Month: June 2008

  • My Bookshelves

    Gid wants to know how I store my books.

    I have over 250 books and counting, but I think the number is more like 300+ because I haven’t catalogued all of them. It’s kinda like bailing out a sinking boat. Most of the books are collected over the span of years. I inherited (“rescued” would be more appropriate) a handful from parents and grandparents. Nobody reads them but they were too cool to throw away.

    All photographs here are viewable in a larger format. Just click. If the Lightbox doesn’t work, you’ll still get the actual file.

    The book stack above resides in a corner of the living room. I convinced my parents that it’s a valid decorating element. Every now and then, I’ll add another book somewhere into the stack or take away something I want to read.

    This bookcase is on the landing upstairs. The phone and modem is on top (you can just see the phone). The two bottom shelves hold children’s books and other large format editions.

    Most of the books here are either orphan trade paperbacks, and books I don’t read any more. Some are books I can’t leave downstairs, least my parents’s church friends drop by and notice that their godless daughter reads about magic, occultism, Harry Potter and 100 Ways to Cook Children.

    img_2796.JPG

    And here is where most of the goods are. Nearly all my paperbacks and series are here. I try to keep my series together regardless of the editions, so some creative arrangement is necessary.

    As you can see from the photo, I mainly store my books lying down. I get to store a lot more books this way, and because my bookcases are deep, I can double stack them and still have a strip of space left. Anyway, I’m not going to peruse my own library looking like this:

    :-|

    Some of the spaces in the lower half are not used for books, but I got no other place for them at the moment. There are some old school magazines that I want to keep, a couple of boxes of comic books my brother and I used to collect, a box file of my old artwork, a bagful of unused notebooks, and some other junk.

    In theory, there’s plenty of space for another 100 books or so, as long as I find a home for all the other non-books.

  • The people that Habitat built

    hfh-village.JPG
    Nice day to get lost.

    It was a beautiful day to be lost in the intestinal tract of roads near Kota Sentosa. I was already an hour late to my appointment and was starting to think that it was One of Those Days. Brilliant blue skies and fat white clouds mocked my inability to find my way out of a paper bag with a map.

    After two phone calls, I found myself on a single lane tarred road that started bearing landmarks noted in my map. The high undergrowth flanking the road broke periodically to reveal houses in various ranges of prosperity. Meanwhile, I noticed that the road was gradually shrinking under my faithful little car.

    Ever the city mouse, I didn’t think I’d find myself in a village that belonged in The Middle of Nowhere within that short a driving distance from town. But there I was in Kampung Temedak, and it was a relief to find the sign I’ve been looking for – the white rectangle that announced I am approaching a Habitat for Humanity (HfH) project, and the end of the longest 10-inch of road I’ve ever seen on a map.

    (more…)

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