Half about books, half about heart
Jul. 24th, 2012 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabThe heart stuff first: yes, I did go to the doctor's the next morning, just to confirm that it was a real episode and what I felt was what I thought it was, and test the device just to make sure nothing's wonky with it. And indeed, yes to all of that. And they raised my dose of Coreg again, now all the way up to what it "should" be - I had previously been taking only half the full dose, for years, because it made me so tired and because nothing much was going wrong and the Coreg wasn't helping my blood pressure that much over and above all the other meds I take - the Diovan or enalapril, the diuretics, etc. And for years, that was fine. But now, it appears that I need it for the anti-arrhythmic effects as well as the antihypertensive effects, so full dose it is.
As usual, a week of anxiety followed that; I'm getting over that part, but this week is still really hard for me, because this is 2 years. Steve's heart attack was late at night on July 20th, it was the 21st by the time we got to the hospital, and his official date of death after all the waiting needed for brain death and organ donation requirements was the 27th. So 2 years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room 24/7 watching Steve's brain waves go flat. It's been giving me little nightmares. But Saturday night Larry stayed over with me, so that helped, and then last night, which was a Monday, like the night Steve had the attack and like it's been late Monday the two v-tach episodes recently, I went over to Cindy's and stayed there for the night on her sofabed. Company, not alone, change of setting - all helpful. I got a really good night's sleep, without any need for diazepam.
It's been 2 years, and IT'S STILL NOT FAIR. I WANT HIM BACK, UNIVERSE!!! Yes, I've made a life for myself, and yes, I have a boyfriend - but it's not the same, and, despite how much I like my new friends and how much everyone sees me coping, it is nonetheless a distinctly inferior life. Worth living, I guess, but not worth as much. Not as much fun, not nearly as easy. What was the name of that play about deaf people, "Children of a Lesser God" - if I believed in a god, that's sort of how I'd feel about this life. It's lesser. Of course, stuff like this is one of the very specific reasons I don't believe in a god, because if there were one, and this less-of-a-life stuff were the deliberate will or action of some god, I would be so mad at that god, and so depressed at being the victim of one of his whims, that life would NOT be worth living.
Now, books. Part of moving is, I have to de-acquisition a LOT of books.
After Steve's death, I had whittled the collection down, slowly, to under 3000, And before moving to this condo, I got it down to under 2000. Unfortunately, that's still rather too many, given that I also have other collections - fabric, yarn, crafts stuff; and also too much furniture. So all of that has to be cut back, and I am making periodic sweeps - one week, manage to pick out 20 more books I can live without, another week, a tote bag full of yarn to go to Goodwill; another week, a shopping bag full of fabric. I mean, If I get the books down to about 1200 and the knick-knacks down to about a quarter of what they were, I'll be able to sell the two huge Drexel bookcases (16" deep, that takes up a big chunk of a small living room!) - which Steve and I had bought used when we were looking for a house in 1996 in Austin - we wound up buying the house on Riverside, but we bought some furniture from the estate of a lady whose condo over in, is it Colorado Tower?, we looked at, including the bookcases and a nice old tea cart I still have. The bookcases were great at Riverside - that was a HUGE house - and they were OK at the house I just sold in Catonsville - a little big for the spaces we had to put them, but not overpowering. But this is a 3-bedroom, 1100 square foot condo, and it's over-full and there's a storage unit I'm paying a hundred bucks a month on. Hence, stuff's gotta go.
One of the things I'm doing is reciting a mantra that goes like this: "The library has this book. The library has this whole series. Every library in Maryland and the surrounding states has this whole series!!" That mantra is useful for a lot of the murder mysteries and some of the science fiction. Of course I am not giving up the Lois Bujolds - I want to be able to reread any Miles book on any spur of the moment! - but the mantra helped me get all the J.A. Jance out the door, because, really, libraries are very good about murder mystery series. And a bunch of Steve's vampire collection that I still had - since vampires have been more popular these last 10 years than they were when I first started reading them or when I turned Steve on to them, more libraries have them, more used book stores have them, and more of them are available as e-books. So I don't need to keep most of them. (The complete Yarbro St. Germain series stays. Don't try to talk me out of that one.)
Another thing that I'm doing is rereading some and then I can give them up. Some of it goes quickly - it turns out that older John Varley doesn't age that well, for example. A quick skim of Titan and I can easily determine that I not only don't need to reread the whole thing, I'm unlikely ever to want to reread it. Various short story collections are worth one reread, but then I don't need to save them for another time after that - if I last read the book 15 years ago, then this re-reading should last me another 15 years without saving the book - if I'm still alive 15 years from now, and want to read a story again, well, I'll figure out how to manage it then.
Some of the books go to the used book store - I load up a box, bring it there, they tell me what they'll buy, and then the rest goes back in the box. From there, the serious non-fiction goes to Cindy for her UU church's perpetual used book sale fundraiser, the Book Nook, and then the rest gets to Goodwill or Baltimore's Book Thing free book recycling warehouse, whichever comes first. So nothing's actually thrown OUT, it's all going to get read by somebody again somehow.
Some of the reading I've done this past 6 months has been new stuff, and there's thoughts on that.
Larry gave me the first volume of the Game of Thrones series, and I plowed through the first three of those at the rate of about 1 a month. Never read them before, never seen the TV show (I don't pay for premium channels, thank you very much), and as far as I know, Steve hadn't ever read them, either - I don't remember them being among the Martin stuff in the huge amount of paperback science fiction that I sorted through in the first year after he died. So it was definitely new to me. And while it's full of extremely unpleasant people doing extremely nasty things, it is also well-written and full of plot twists, and I liked those first three volumes. But then I started #4, A Feast for Crows, and just couldn't get into it - I was fed up, had my fill of them, couldn't work up the enthusiasm. So I've put that aside. Then what I started in on in June was the Harry Potter stuff, which I had never read - I had a complete hardcover set which I had liberated from my friend Sally's hoard a couple years ago, so I though, OK, that's over half a shelf I can read and then de-acq. And while they're not great stuff, they're OK, and it was entertaining for a few volumes, but I got to volume 5 and I could scarcely get through it - I wound up having to skim parts - because I was tired of the characters, of the bad guys all being so obvious and Harry not learning a damn thing about people, and the Weasleys being the same jokes and so on and on and on - so I tried starting volume 6, said the heck with it, and got rid of the whole set - if I ever want to read volumes 6 and 7, every damn public library in the English-speaking world has them. Right?
So that's the process. I am trying to remember to record all the re-reads on Goodreads as I go along, and also the library books I have been reading interspersed because a body can't read 100% fantasy series 100% of the time. If there's still any of you who I haven't found or haven't found me there, well, I'm easy to find.
As usual, a week of anxiety followed that; I'm getting over that part, but this week is still really hard for me, because this is 2 years. Steve's heart attack was late at night on July 20th, it was the 21st by the time we got to the hospital, and his official date of death after all the waiting needed for brain death and organ donation requirements was the 27th. So 2 years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room 24/7 watching Steve's brain waves go flat. It's been giving me little nightmares. But Saturday night Larry stayed over with me, so that helped, and then last night, which was a Monday, like the night Steve had the attack and like it's been late Monday the two v-tach episodes recently, I went over to Cindy's and stayed there for the night on her sofabed. Company, not alone, change of setting - all helpful. I got a really good night's sleep, without any need for diazepam.
It's been 2 years, and IT'S STILL NOT FAIR. I WANT HIM BACK, UNIVERSE!!! Yes, I've made a life for myself, and yes, I have a boyfriend - but it's not the same, and, despite how much I like my new friends and how much everyone sees me coping, it is nonetheless a distinctly inferior life. Worth living, I guess, but not worth as much. Not as much fun, not nearly as easy. What was the name of that play about deaf people, "Children of a Lesser God" - if I believed in a god, that's sort of how I'd feel about this life. It's lesser. Of course, stuff like this is one of the very specific reasons I don't believe in a god, because if there were one, and this less-of-a-life stuff were the deliberate will or action of some god, I would be so mad at that god, and so depressed at being the victim of one of his whims, that life would NOT be worth living.
Now, books. Part of moving is, I have to de-acquisition a LOT of books.
After Steve's death, I had whittled the collection down, slowly, to under 3000, And before moving to this condo, I got it down to under 2000. Unfortunately, that's still rather too many, given that I also have other collections - fabric, yarn, crafts stuff; and also too much furniture. So all of that has to be cut back, and I am making periodic sweeps - one week, manage to pick out 20 more books I can live without, another week, a tote bag full of yarn to go to Goodwill; another week, a shopping bag full of fabric. I mean, If I get the books down to about 1200 and the knick-knacks down to about a quarter of what they were, I'll be able to sell the two huge Drexel bookcases (16" deep, that takes up a big chunk of a small living room!) - which Steve and I had bought used when we were looking for a house in 1996 in Austin - we wound up buying the house on Riverside, but we bought some furniture from the estate of a lady whose condo over in, is it Colorado Tower?, we looked at, including the bookcases and a nice old tea cart I still have. The bookcases were great at Riverside - that was a HUGE house - and they were OK at the house I just sold in Catonsville - a little big for the spaces we had to put them, but not overpowering. But this is a 3-bedroom, 1100 square foot condo, and it's over-full and there's a storage unit I'm paying a hundred bucks a month on. Hence, stuff's gotta go.
One of the things I'm doing is reciting a mantra that goes like this: "The library has this book. The library has this whole series. Every library in Maryland and the surrounding states has this whole series!!" That mantra is useful for a lot of the murder mysteries and some of the science fiction. Of course I am not giving up the Lois Bujolds - I want to be able to reread any Miles book on any spur of the moment! - but the mantra helped me get all the J.A. Jance out the door, because, really, libraries are very good about murder mystery series. And a bunch of Steve's vampire collection that I still had - since vampires have been more popular these last 10 years than they were when I first started reading them or when I turned Steve on to them, more libraries have them, more used book stores have them, and more of them are available as e-books. So I don't need to keep most of them. (The complete Yarbro St. Germain series stays. Don't try to talk me out of that one.)
Another thing that I'm doing is rereading some and then I can give them up. Some of it goes quickly - it turns out that older John Varley doesn't age that well, for example. A quick skim of Titan and I can easily determine that I not only don't need to reread the whole thing, I'm unlikely ever to want to reread it. Various short story collections are worth one reread, but then I don't need to save them for another time after that - if I last read the book 15 years ago, then this re-reading should last me another 15 years without saving the book - if I'm still alive 15 years from now, and want to read a story again, well, I'll figure out how to manage it then.
Some of the books go to the used book store - I load up a box, bring it there, they tell me what they'll buy, and then the rest goes back in the box. From there, the serious non-fiction goes to Cindy for her UU church's perpetual used book sale fundraiser, the Book Nook, and then the rest gets to Goodwill or Baltimore's Book Thing free book recycling warehouse, whichever comes first. So nothing's actually thrown OUT, it's all going to get read by somebody again somehow.
Some of the reading I've done this past 6 months has been new stuff, and there's thoughts on that.
Larry gave me the first volume of the Game of Thrones series, and I plowed through the first three of those at the rate of about 1 a month. Never read them before, never seen the TV show (I don't pay for premium channels, thank you very much), and as far as I know, Steve hadn't ever read them, either - I don't remember them being among the Martin stuff in the huge amount of paperback science fiction that I sorted through in the first year after he died. So it was definitely new to me. And while it's full of extremely unpleasant people doing extremely nasty things, it is also well-written and full of plot twists, and I liked those first three volumes. But then I started #4, A Feast for Crows, and just couldn't get into it - I was fed up, had my fill of them, couldn't work up the enthusiasm. So I've put that aside. Then what I started in on in June was the Harry Potter stuff, which I had never read - I had a complete hardcover set which I had liberated from my friend Sally's hoard a couple years ago, so I though, OK, that's over half a shelf I can read and then de-acq. And while they're not great stuff, they're OK, and it was entertaining for a few volumes, but I got to volume 5 and I could scarcely get through it - I wound up having to skim parts - because I was tired of the characters, of the bad guys all being so obvious and Harry not learning a damn thing about people, and the Weasleys being the same jokes and so on and on and on - so I tried starting volume 6, said the heck with it, and got rid of the whole set - if I ever want to read volumes 6 and 7, every damn public library in the English-speaking world has them. Right?
So that's the process. I am trying to remember to record all the re-reads on Goodreads as I go along, and also the library books I have been reading interspersed because a body can't read 100% fantasy series 100% of the time. If there's still any of you who I haven't found or haven't found me there, well, I'm easy to find.
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Date: 2012-07-25 03:44 am (UTC)Great big giant smooshy *hugs* on the rest of it.
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Date: 2012-07-26 07:01 pm (UTC)I need to buy a pair of shoes so I have a shoebox so I can mail you Plush Cthulhu.
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Date: 2012-07-25 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 07:08 pm (UTC)