The time has come. I've bitten the bullet, and I'm going to do it. One reason we bought this house was so that Laura and I could each have our own little hobby rooms. I moved much of my stuff in, of course, but over the years the actual use I've gotten out of it has ebbed and waned as stuff moved around, got stored in there, etc. Well now we're both going to make an effort to clear out a lot of the clutter in this house. I've already moved a lot of extra stuff out of what I hope will become my Oz room, and even moved in my desk and computer, so I've been doing more stuff in here already. And I have a deadline to keep me going. My Oz friends are coming over for an Oogaboo Rendezvous on April 16, so I want to have it all done by then so they can all see it. Toward that end, I want to document my progress. So here's how most of it stands right now:
Quite a pile, huh? Off to the right, you can see the highlight of my collection. It's a lawyer bookcase that my parents bought for us as a wedding present, and I keep the bulk of my most important Oz books in it. That I won't need to touch, at least for now, but once I get digging through my stuff a bit more, I want to put my books by Eloise Jarvis McGraw in the bottom shelf. Off in the corner is a set of shelves with boxes. Those are most of the rest of my collection, and they're all the books I've inventoried over the past decade or so. At least I have a decent idea where any one book is, thanks to that inventory. Everything else is just stuff I have to figure out a place to put it. As you can guess, this is not going to be easy.
But here's where I will probably start:
This is looking the other way. The clutter in the picture above is behind me. That bookcase? That's a big reason I'm doing this now. My parents recently moved, and they offered to give me three cases like this. I jumped at the opportunity, hoping it would give me the incentive I needed to get going on this project. This one I put up by my desk (the stuff in the lower left corner of this picture is on the desk). Once I got this up, it gave me a place to shove stuff and get it out of the way while I moved in the other two bookcases. They are now on the wall behind me, back-to-back forming a peninsula. Yes, I've screwed them to each other and earthquake strapped them to the wall, so they should be pretty stable now. (By the way, you can see two of the doors just to the left of the case in the picture above. Yes, it's so crammed in here right now that I couldn't hang those doors.) So anyway, to make a long story short ("Too late!"), I want to clear out and organize the bookcase by my desk as a place to keep non-fiction and other reference works so they're easily accessible. I had many in the lawyer case, but the fiction collection just kept growing so much that they got shoved out. Besides, this way I can have more stuff within reach. So, I'm going to start with this case and clearing out my desk, since some of the stuff in there I think I've had since middle school! I will try to give you updates and let you know how it's going, and I also hope to show you all the final results soon. Wish me luck!
Oh, and while I'm here, let me just brag about my latest Oz acquisition. It's a Disney DVD, Your Host, Walt Disney. It's a collection of episodes of Walt's television show, and a few other goodies. The reason I got it? It includes "The Fourth Anniversary Show," where the Mousketeers encourage Walt to make a movie of the Oz books, and to let them star in it. However, The Rainbow Road to Oz never got much further than the sketches on this show, but at least we get a glimpse. There's also a look behind the scenes at another Disney film (one that did get made), Babes in Toyland, starring Ray Bolger. The rest of it looks pretty good, too.
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