Books are my friends.

While I was at Jessica's over Thanksgiving, we watched an Oprah she had taped. It was one of the the shows which dealt with a woman who had become a hoarder. People who hoard to the extent that woman did have a compulsive disorder. Like many disorders, hoarding is a fairly harmless tendency that many of us have that has gone wild in the hoarder. Jessica and I got to talking about what we tend to hang on to or acquire beyond what we need. I confessed that with me, it is books.

I love to read. I always have one or two or more books going. My bedside table attests to this.


I also love to acquire books. The earliest presents I remember getting were those "Little Golden Books" that used to cost a nickle or a dime. Instead of badgering my mother for candy or toys when we went to the store, I would bargain for a Little Golden Book. I was pretty good at it and eventually, I had a whole shelf full.




I have moved many times and on each of those moves I have packed and hauled boxes and boxes of books. I think I do this in part because my books make me feel secure and at home. I also think they represent a kind of wealth to me, a wealth of knowledge. My books are not rare volumns and are not intrinsicly valuable, bit they are mine and comfort me.



Periodicially, I cull my shelves and thin out those books which I am sure I will never read again or read for the first time. I ususally give the culls to my local library of which I am a very loyal and frequent patron for their annual "Friends of the Library" sale.




My hoarding tendency is stocking up on even more books before I have read the one's I already have. I do this constantly. Then, to make matters worse so that I fall even further behind in reading what I already have, I go to the library and check out even more books to read.
If I am not content with what my local libraries have on their shelves, I order more through interlibrary loan. The two libraries I use, the local library and the university library, have made it only a matter of a few clicks and keystrokes for me to access millions of volumns for free.

I am always on the lookout for new authors and new books. I read several blogs dealing with books. Nancy Pearl's Book Lust and Nonfiction Readers are just two of them. Before the internet, I used to read Booklist, the ALA publication about new books, regularly in order to make lists of books I wanted to read. I guess the list making is another manifestation of my own book lust.


I am trying to cut back. I have put myself on book probation. I cannot buy any more books for myself until I have read 10 of the books I already have and have not read. One of the rules of this probation is that I can use the library. This is not meant to be a cruel punishment, rather it is just to get me out of the habit of acquiring more books than I have time to read.




I plan on keeping track of what I have read by making a list for this blog. I also plan on celebrating when I finish reading the ten books by buying myself a present. A book.

Birds of a feather

After spending a few days in relatively warm Austin (40, overcast, rain), it was nice to get back to the dry, sunny, cold Laramie. Sunday was my first day home and we went up to Pole Mountain to run or hike. There were a few clouds, but it was a bright day and not much wind. The trail I took, Headquarters, is a point to point trail, but there are several places where other trails join or intersect so you don't have to hike the whole way. My plan was to hike out about 45 minutes to a place where the trail comes to the top of a ridge and the trees thin out and then take another trail back to the truck. From that spot, on clear days like Sunday, you can see the front range with Long's Peak and Mount Meeker in the distance to the south. If you move your line of sight a bit to the west the mountains of the Rawah Wilderness poke their white heads up above Boulder Ridge. Further west is the seemingly solitary Jelm and then the Snowies are almost directly west of this vantage. The altitude at that spot is about 8800 feet so it's no surprise you can see a ways.

It was late afternoon as I was standing there taking in the view. The sun was about a foot above the horizon. The slanting light was bright and clear. As I looked, a flock of birds flew up in front of me. At first I thought they were just misc. brown birds. I watched them roil through the sky in that wonderful way flocks of birds have. How do they fly like that and not smash into one another?
As they flew, over and behind me, I noticed that they were not just misc. brown birds. They were larger than sparrows and had a different look than starlings.
The flock of about 50 or 60 birds landed in a dead pine tree about 20 yards behind where I stood. Since I was between them and the sun, they seemed to be in a spotlight. I could clearly see their plumage and markings. I knew they were waxwings of some kind. The only kind I was familiar with were cedar waxwings. However, these birds had a rufous patch on the bottom of their tails. When I got home and looked them up, it turned out that they were Bohemian waxwings. I kicked myself for not bringing the camera along. As I took a step to leave, they all flew out of the tree.