Dear Log,
The last cruise ship of the season has left. The town is much quieter.
In other news, I just found this stray kitten staggering blearily around in my yard, nearly blinded by a nasty upper-respiratory infection, and seething with fleas. After one day, a pound of kitten food, and a series of veterinary drugs, he is now strutting around the house like he owns the place.
As I pack my stuff to move to a new house on the other side of town, I discover that the thing to do when you're moving and have a lot of books, is to ask at liquor stores for their used cardboard boxes; they get lots of boxes in, and the boxes are very often smallish, by design; a box that's still a good carryable size when full of bottles, is also not too heavy once you've filled it with books. Asking at restaurants can be good too, for similar reasons; but their boxes might have food bits stuck to the inside or outside, which can lead to nastiness.
The other technique I used long ago was to take the boxes used to hold 24 cans of soda pop, the ones that are half as high as the can and wrapped in shrink wrap plastic. These boxes are great for holding paperback books - you get two rows of books lying with the spine upward (which makes the book about the same height as a pop can). I actually used a bunch of those for years. I had shelves that were tall enough to have two boxes high per shelf (that was 4 bricks, as I recall). I could just slide out a box to scan the titles and find the book I wanted. When I moved, I just separated the boards and bricks, and carried the books already in boxes. Now that I've been in the same house for 20 years, though, I've moved to more normal bookshelves. (Well, still somewhat unusual - I get about 6000 paperbacks in a set of shelves that fit in a space 3' x 8' while still being able to see all the spines.)
