Library of Congress vs. Dewey

Thanksgiving weekend was spent mostly unpacking. I spent approximately 8-10 hours a day cataloguing about 350 books. Yes, I know, I'm a freak.... I pretty much know what books I have, but decided to put call numbers on them when I realized Chaim and I would be combining all of our books together, to make it easier for us to find them. There are a lot of art and design books, so most of the shelves up to this point are filled with N books. I'm much more comfortable with the Library of Congress than the Dewey Decimal call number system of dividing up the books, but the ones that I didn't agree with, I put my own numbers and catalogued them to make sense of it.

I have a few oddball volumes; from Rob, from one of his trips home to Holland, an operetta by Robert Wilson in Dutch; and a found hardback architectural sketchbook with a forged inscription by an ex-boyfriend. These get catalogued in their own special places.

In the new glass fronted shelves that was given to us by Mordecai ben Chaim, we have started an autographed book section. My copy of The Corrections from Jonathan Franzen sits surrounded by Chaim's numerous books from famous authors and artists.
There are about 20 more boxes in the studio that will be unpacked soon, and we haven't even begun with the fiction. oy vay!

Joining our Stuff.

We are finally at the stage of moving boxes and beginning to unpack. This is the first time that Chaim and I will have all of our belongings together under one room. When I say all of our belongings, this means my studio (with large power tools), old art in crates from the countless sculpture exhibits where nothing was sold, my library, both of our art works and report cards from elementary school, his 10,000+ menu collection, his collection of hockey sticks, plastic spoons, chewing gum, graffiti stickers, 30 lbs of keys, and the list goes on for may pages.

My mother came with a car load of belongings I didn't even want or have room for.


Two weekends ago, Chaim and I took a one way flight to Buffalo and drove a 12 foot truck filled with more stuff, like the aforementioned hockey stick collection back to New York. Thank goodness we got a few pieces of furniture to store some of this stuff in. Currently we are living in a cramped house, resembling more of an antique or thrift shop. We have very little furniture, so the boxes and crates act as night stands, and side tables.

Since Chaim and I have been living the luxurious lifestyle (NOT!) of having two apartments plus a 500 sqft studio, we have doubles, and sometimes triples of some items. In the Kitchen, these multiple items are most prevalent. We have just unpacked only one quarter of our boxes marked KITCHEN, and already we have a few boxes of repetitive gadgets and flatware, items that will soon be packed away to be given away the next kid we know that goes off to college, or sold for very cheaply in our first ever yard sale in the spring. We also finally got to unpack and open our wedding presents and are glad to say we still like what we picked from the Williams and Sonoma registry.

Though we are no longer collecting rainwater, our whole kitchen cabinetry is constructed out of used furniture. The first set I constructed out of our old crappy MDF entertainment center. There will be cabinet doors made from a collection of fruit crate wood, among other scrap wood I have from the studio.

We Are So Brown.

It's not easy being green, as I've stated months back when I re-tiled the bathroom in Chaim's apartment on the Upper East side. Now after months of trying to live an Eco-conscious lifestyle, we are now throwing in our non-biodegradable towel and giving up. I got a package in the mail from HSBC bank, with a "go green kit". It contained a very dim fluorescent bulb, this note pad, (that's really just a waste of paper since there is hardly space to make a list due to all the ads), a reusable bag that's too small to use in my current lifestyle, and a whole lot of papers and pamphlets talking about being green. It seems that this green living promoted by huge corporations is a sham.

Let me explain though, that we did try very hard to be green:

1. Recycling Rain Water:
After we discovered how much rain water comes out of our rooftop gutter every time it pours, we began collecting bottles and bottles of it in the 2 litre Schweppes Seltzer bottles. The last time we had a downpour, Chaim was outside on the parapet getting soaking wet collecting rain water for about 20 minutes. He proudly dragged in 32 bottles and we brought them down to our side garden, being so proud of ourselves that we could water our garden guilt free the next time a drought hit Queens.

The bottles sat in our garden for about one day, looking as though we were about to throw a party or we ransacked the Schweppes bottle plant. The next morning, we awoke to 3 bottles sitting in our garden, with our front sidewalk littered with white caps. Apparently, the Hispanic recycling ladies came by and emptied all our bottles so they could get the nickel for the bottles. They had the nerve to dump out all our hard work and pollute our front sidewalk with non recyclable plastic caps.

2. The compost heap.
Early in the summer, I built a nice compost bin out of the lathe that came out of our house. It is compact, well fairly compact (3x4x3 foot box) with a swinging front gate. We have been throwing in all kinds or organic matter into it daily. The amount of organic waste we create, along with the leaves and vines we pulled off the tree proved too much for my little box. Now mind you, we have not had a kitchen for 3 months, so there is not that much food waste being produced out of our house. Just last week, Chaim cleaned out the table saw (though demolition is over, he is still in charge of garbage and food), and dumped five drywall buckets of sawdust into the compost heap. Since the heap is situated in the back of the yard, we thought that the flies and gnats that it attracted would help in deterring our next door neighbors (i.e. the Ecuadorian night club kitchen workers) from opening the Fire exit door to our garden.

It is now November and we still have gnats flying about, sometimes in our downstairs bathroom. Last week I found a slug that had meandered into the house dragging a hair of corncob husk from a summer barbecue, no doubt from the compost pile. There's so much stuff in there, that it is hard to turn the pile, which you are supposed to do every few weeks. And most people tell us that it will take a long time before we can use it for the garden. In the mean time, we need the space outside so that I can build a small shed for the new barbecue grill (given to us by mom and pop Mordecai) along with other gardening odds and ends, since there is no longer room in the garage for such things.

3. Fluorescent light bulbs.
I like the idea of having these low energy saving bulbs in every socket in the house. I've been collecting them, sending away for them, from places like HSBC every time they have a give away program. There are two problems with these bulbs, not including the fact that they are not bright enough to work under.

1. They are a weird shape and thus, do not fit under the glass fixtures in the ceiling lights. The two I screwed in the bathroom fixture immediately broke under the compression of the glass dome covering. The ones installed in the kitchen were too big also, thus, I had to remount the glass cover upside-down, and it looks ridiculous. The second problem is that the new dimmer switches we installed to operate the fans in the remainder of the rooms are not compatible with florescent lights. In fact we learned that no dimmer switches work with these bulbs. So now we have a lot of bulbs sitting in the laundry closet awaiting a new system.

The plumbers have not returned yet, so we are saving fuel, since we are only heating 1/3rd of the house. That's about all we are doing to stay green, or shall we say blue.....