Hello! Welcome to my blog where I hope to chronicle my adventures walking around and finding books on the side of the road or wherever they may be. I'll also be reviewing the books I read because I'm a Virgo Type 8 ESTJ so I have a lot to say about everything.
My hobby is having hobbies. I am always hobby-ing. Reading, writing, crocheting, cross-stitching, painting, something-ing, anything-ing to keep my mind busy because Anxiety. I don't know if you can call walking your dog a hobby, but if so, that's another hobby. I walk my dog, Duffy, pictured below, almost every day. While I walk, I talk on the phone to my long distance friends or listen to podcasts/audiobooks/Taylor Swift albums - more hobbies of mine.
Mostly, I walk in the subdivisions around my house, but a few times a month we'll get wild and drive to Beaufort which is a short, beautiful drive over two bridges. On rare and special and delightful occasions, we'll make the trek to New Bern which is also beautiful but 45 whole minutes away. I'd like to tell you that I use these walks to digest my day - what went wrong and what I can be proud of and to think about the people I encountered that are in need of prayer - but I just use it to digest my dinner. Please keep reading, I promise not to make (m)any more bad gastrointestinal jokes.
I need these walks so much that I will go no matter the weather. I've gone for walks in conditions that would cause the USPS to not deliver mail. I'll happily go in freezing temps, when I have to dress like that thing to the left.
What I love about these walks, besides the motion (which is mandatory for managing clinical anxiety) is that I see something interesting on every walk. Even when I walk the same streets I've walked a hundred times, there always seems to be something to creepily stare at in my neighbors' yards, garages, or houses. I have no shame about this. If your blinds are open or your garage door is up, I will crane my neck analyzing your shit until I can no longer see it. Sometimes it is something exciting and action-packed: I've looked for a missing dog with a distraught neighbor and returned a runaway dog that I caught to the address I found on the collar. Sometimes its funny: I once saw a woman hit her husband with one hand while giving him a buzz cut at the kitchen table with the other. Sometimes I get a little too invested: Like the time I didn't see the pot-belly pig I love looking at from afar for 3 weeks and thought the owners ate him (turns out his new pen is in the back yard, no worries).
Almost to the point- stick with me
I have another, less disturbing habit on these walks - another hobby and the subject of this blog - getting books from various Little Free Library boxes. I can't help myself at all. It's like a damn cookie jar or donut box or bag of cheese that I just can't keep my fingers out of. When I pass one of these libraries, I open them up and the warm glow of words envelops me no matter how cold or dark it is. JK JK LOL what if I really talked like that (but actually that is kinda exactly how it makes me feel to get a new book). I always end up taking a book home with me.
BUT
And this is a big butt. Ok, and I further promise not to make (m)any more bad homophone jokes.
BUT I have a terrible, terrible habit of not actually reading all those books that I gleefully perused and carefully picked out of the many choices within a particular little library and carried home with as much care as I imagine a new mother carries home her first born. Except then I just put my new baby on a dusty shelf and never think about it again (please stop asking me - and all women without children - why I don't have kids by 30, if that sentence doesn't explain it to you nothing will).
Here are the receipts to prove it.
The bookshelf in my living room. If my high school self knew the only bookshelf in my house was this small, I'm not sure I would have made it here today.
The shelf in my Lady Fun Room (not sorry about that name, it isn't any worse than Woman Cave and Wes got our shed for his man-cave so it can't be a She-Shed).
And since I am out of actual shelf space, the desk in my lady fun room now does double duty. Clearly not enough room to finish that Great American Novel I've been "editing" since 2018.
Clearly, something must be done about this. The new year is upon us and what better time is there to make a drastic change to your entire personality?
I was talking with friends about our hopes and goals for the New Year and this blog takes care of several of them - which I will now list in order of importance because Virgo Type 8 ESTJ.
ONE
I spend all day staring at a computer screen with my neck in a precarious position. I've started to wear those special glasses that are supposed to help with eye strain. Maybe they do and maybe its a placebo effect, but I look cuuute in them so I'll keep wearing them. But then I come home and stare at a smaller screen while occasionally looking up at a bigger screen that inevitably has a sporting event of some sort on it. I want to stop reading so much on my phone and read more "real books" which should reduce eye strain and something something about blue light and melatonin and I'm guaranteed better sleep. And yes, I realize I'm starting something else on the computer, but I think the time spent on the screen writing a blog about paper books will be less overall than I was spending reading on a screen before.
TWO
I want to read a greater variety of books. I used to voraciously read anything I could get my hands on. Admittedly, my reading list was a study in pedantry (see my Dostoevsky phase which consisted of 30% reading Dostoevsky and 70% telling people I was reading Dostoevsky). As I've gotten older, my reading lists have shifted to... should I do it? fuck it, its my blog and who will actually have read this far anyway?... my reading lists have shifted to shafts.
Don't get me wrong. I love romances. I love the genre. I think of it as an entire industry that is by women and for women and I love to argue the value of romances with anyone. So, do not get me wrong here. I do not have a goal to stop reading romances because I think they are trashy (some of them are) or that the writing is qualitatively worse than other genres (although some of it is just awful) or that I feel bad about reading steamy scenes (although some of it is straight up porn). I just want more variety.
THREE
I *think* I want to spend less time on social media. I only have Instagram (unless Pinterest counts, but it does not, but thanks for asking). The harm vs value of social media is something I go back and forth on. Am I spending too much time on it? Is it harming my self-esteem? Do I really give a fuck if that person from high school saw my story or liked my post (shit, I really do, what does that mean about the life I have built and really love?? does that mean I don't really love it if I need that validation from someone I would never want to be??).
There is a flip side, though. During work, while TrakNet tries its damnedest to load all the remits I need to work before lunch, I lean on (almost rely on) dumb fucking memes and pictures of Kim Kardashian's various body parts to scroll through so that I won't lose my mind watching that tiny blue circle spin. And I get almost all my essential news from the Buzzfeed link in bio. Oh, and pictures of the people that I do actually care about are on there, too. Despite my husband's Luddite rants, I believe there are positives to social media so I'm still experiencing the Social Dilemma (even watched that damn documentary and I'm still on the fence).
I think the problem I really have with social media is that I am not as honest on there as I would like to be. I often get in trouble for (or make things awkward by) being too honest (or emotional/dramatic/harsh - semantics) in real life. And I really try to be real on my Instagram page, but in looking back over my posts I have to admit that I am guilty of sprucing up my life for my many (134) followers. I mean, you can't see my mustache in any of the pictures and I don't think I mention the times when I don't shower for many, many days in a row because I have to save all the energy that my panic attacks have zapped from me to drag myself into work. So, get ready to see my facial hair and unwashed body - metaphorically speaking - on this blog.
Ok. Now that I have thoroughly explained myself.
I spent New Year's Eve going through my books and making two stacks.
The first is the stack of books that I want to keep. It includes my childhood Bible that I don't read anymore because I am now a heretic who reads the ESV. It also includes books that people have loaned me that I need to return (the Richard Russo essay collection), some books that I fucking love and want to read over and over (the Poe collection, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), and some books that were gifts that brought me great joy (Texts from Jane Eyre, the Jane Austen coffee table book, the North Carolina book) and some are books that I bought that I need to read or reread to become a better person (Quit Like a Woman and the Tim Keller books), and one book that I like to read on the beach for irony's sake but haven't finished yet so I have to keep it until next summer (Salt: A World's History).
Note the posture of shame I'm displaying in the second picture (and also note Duffy). These are the books that I never read. This is the stack of books that I am sending back out into the Little Free Library universe. I picked them out once because I thought I would love them, but you know what Christina Aguilera says, if you love something let it go and if it comes back that's how you know you should read the damn book cause that's what it is for.
My husband and I loaded up all these books and distributed them over Little Free Libraries in Morehead City, Atlantic Beach, and Beaufort. It was hard to let some of them go, but I believe in the wisdom of my second favorite 90s female singer.
Come back for Chapter 1 (and hopefully more chapters than that because I had to pay to get the domain name I wanted) where I will walk to a Little Free Library, pick out a book, and then review it for you.
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