Back! Many pictures and much talking soon. But first, a short scene: How Jet Lag Seems To Work In This Household.

Time: Day after a 11-time-zone flight

T: Hey, I'm not sure I buy into this whole jet lag thing. I've woken up after 9 hours of sleep feeling normal and rested. I could easily imagine [insert moderately ambitious day-after-trip project here, like going to work or navigating across town for dinner].
J: Yeah, I feel great too. Let's still take it easy, though. How about we chill out at our home base for a little while, and then [insert less-ambitious project, like going outside, period].
T: Sure, sounds reasonable. Maybe I'll take a nap*.
J: Sounds good. Let's go an hour from now.
T and J, in unison: *yawn* *yawn* *yawTHUNK*
6 hours later
T and J: Well that was a nice half hour nap! Wait, why's it all dark outside?
fin


*Napping while not exhausted on a day off is not unusual behavior on my part. I consider napping to be one of my hobbies.

Phase #2 in Month-O-Crazy: heading off to Japan. To fill the void, enjoy my stockpile of internet amusements.

This image of Neil Armstrong just after getting back from the first moonwalk brings tears to my eyes, and makes me feel like humanity has to be doing *something* right.

Traceurs at my alma mater. I love how the background people totally ignore them.

"Modern Samurai" video With a pretty bad translation, though it's good enough to get the idea. I like the bean the best.

Tiny, awesome DDR player. Cheers me up for some reason.

The Accent Archive (English section) Lots of English speakers saying the same short paragraph. Useful for inspring or easing homesickness (or other location-sickness).

Sita Sings The Blues, an absolutely amazing movie that J, Shira, Ari, and I saw over the weekend. The description makes it sound dry and unamazing, so just skip that, go to the "watch it" section and check out the first 5-10 minutes. Chances are excellent that you'll want to see the rest. I'm going to watch it again tonight, myself.

This was a response to a comment on the previous entry, which got long enough to deserve its own entry.

Our normal book arrangement, by section.
Non-shared:

J's* fiction
J's non-fiction
My fiction
My non-fiction
My um.. autobiographical non-fiction? (not quite that, but it's a well-defined category in my own head which is all that matters. Personal essays, largely, also nonfiction where I learn as much about the author as a particular topic.)
My unread books.

Shared:

Manga
Reference (puzzle books end up here, because I often need to look something up when working a crossword)
Filled-up blank journals (J writes real things in his, mine mostly contain knitting charts and spinning specifications)
Cookbooks
Craft reference
Harry Potter
Oversized books (some reference, some photo albums, some yearbooks, some art books)
Magazines, arranged by title.

That seems like a lot of books when I write it out, but several of those share a single shelf.

I think J has some sub-organization in his sections; I can recognize one as "funny soothing stuff when I can't get to sleep", and another as "Sci Fi that makes me nostalgic", but the rest are even more Borges-ian and even I don't understand the workings of his mind well enough to deduce them.

I usually arrange my sections by size. So, I'm usually a visually-based arranger to begin with. Arranging by color wasn't much of a stretch, except that on this occasion I used all J's books for my purposes.

*We freely steal from each other's libraries, the person who buys the book is usually the one who ends up with the book on their shelf.

So I just had this ridiculously stressful couple of weeks which ended up leading to having an apartment full of stuff boxed up ready to move, with no new apartment to move it into.

This made me feel better, even though I might need to rebox them again soon:



I don't know if we'll keep these like this permanently. J joined me in admiring it on Friday night, but I can also hear his Librarian Brain whirring in confusion. Bruce Lee's Fighting Method sitting between Harry Potter and my organic chemistry modeling kit? Wrong.

On the other hand, there's the occasional serendipity. Christine Jorgenson, David Sedaris, and Shakespeare are neighbors in this arrangement, and that seems to have the makings of a delightful any-3-people-living-or-dead dinner party. And First Love Sisters and Real Boys are separated by Chicago and Italy.

Here's what I learned as I played with this:

White and black do not go, even if the text is huge, bold, and brightly colored. They need to live somewhere else.

I set the tan/off white books on their own at first, but they the yellow and orange looked incomplete without them.

To me, the exact chromal order didn't seem quite as important as having several sub-groupings by shading. A few relatively light or dark books looked more intentional together than dispersed.

There are disproportionately few purple books in our (veryvery) random sampling. But there's lots of blue books to make up for it. An RO/YG/BIV arrangment seems to very roughly split things into thirds, with the brownish books being split between the O and the Y.

I thought that this might come out really ugly since we don't have quite enough books to avoid a pixellation effect, and because, y'know, we buy books to read not because of the color of the covers. But I love how it looks. I'm thinking that when we reorganize the books (either by reboxing these and moving or by staying here and getting the rest of the books out), that I'll try to do it with the whole collection, over several bookshelves. Except the oversized books. And possibly the cookbooks.

It pleases me, overall. If I had enough books to do so I'd probably set it up so that the X axis was sorted by color and the Y axis was sorted by brightness. That way the black and white spines would have a clearer place.

Or, I'd just have one really long bookshelf going around the whole apartment at about eye-level.













Nothing to talk about yet.