Preparations

Tomorrow is Monday. On Thursday, I leave, ready or not, for Denmark. There are still literally dozens of things to do and here I am at 2:00 a.m. sifting through my files, organizing my address book, and pulling together different strands of my life in an attempt at organizing myself so that I can leave in three days without having a complete anxiety attack during the intervening days.

At least the house is in better shape than it was a week or two ago. At that time, I had taken out all my files and had strated to go through my papers, throwing out things right and left, purging my file cabinets of anything deemed even remotely out-of-date and trying to consolidate everything into a few heavy boxes.

Last week, I also began to pack my books which was one of the most laborious tasks that I had to face. It wasn't just a matter of putting everything into boxes, closing them up, and sticking them into the attic. We're talking about books, here -- books that I have carefully collected and gathered over the years, books that are too rare to even find on eBay or Alibris. My books deserved a bit more respect.

This just means that I spent hours organizing these books by topic or subject, carefully arranging them in boxes, labelling and numbering the boxes, cataloguing the contents of each box, and then wrapping each box in plastic so that the heat and humidity won't get to them. Tomorrow, these carefully labeled, numbered, and bagged boxes will go upstairs into our attic.

I was looking through some of the titles today and I have to admit: it's going to be hard to be without a lot of these. I am used to being with my books -- being able to refer to some passage in Russell Kirk or some pithy phrase in Roger Scruton or re-reading some perplexing passage in Richard Weaver or simply jumping into some Wodehouse for some light and amusing reading. Not having them to rely on will be, well, difficult.