July 21, 2025
The Archival Project: Once More Unto the Breach
The morning begins in the usual way when I wake up in the dark, reach for my iPad on the end table near my head and open it up to see what time it is. 1:45. I've still got the pad open to the NYT Sudoku puzzle I was partway through a few hours earlier when Rachael came to bed and it was time to turn out the lights. I glanced over her way to confirm her head was turned toward the window so the light wouldn't awaken her and then turned back to complete the puzzle. I stared at it a minute, found a square that could be completed, and pressed it with my finger to activate it before selecting its number to fill it with.
It's when my finger just went through the screen into the ether behind it that I realized I was dreaming. And gradually the Sudoku puzzle morphed into something else entirely: a dynamic representation of the books I filtered through yesterday in my latest assault on the storage unit. The squares of the puzzle fluctuated between the books under consideration and the voiced images of folks helping me come to a decision.
And then I got on with the morning in the usual way: off to the bathroom, take my morning meds, catch up with the morning news and the bloggers I follow, complete the day's Wordle challenge, and then head off to Ovation when it opens at six.
Monday: the Archival Project
The plan for this day changed when I looked at the weather forecast the evening before and was startled to see that light rain was in this morning's forecast, the first precipitation in at least a week and the only one in the forecast for the coming two. It's obviously just the wrong time for the meetup with Carl down in Whiskey Creek that's been on the calendar for a while so he annd I exchange messages and agree to try again Wednesday.
Rachael is up nursing her cup of cold coffee she refrigerated the night before, and complaining about how chilly it is this morning. And she's not wrong on that point - it's chilly inside, and damp outside. I point out that with just a bit more patience she could have microwaved her coffee before bolting it down, so we'll see if that suggested improvement gets folded into her routine tomorrow.
She's coherent though, so we quickly talk through the day before she frisks me for any missing essentials as I step out the door. Her foot is still bothering her some this morning so she prefers to walk; and I decide to have at the storage unit again while I've still got time for it. Neither of us has quite come to grips yet with the fact that we leave for Bellingham in less than two weeks.
The ground is wet and it's very lightly sprinkling when I bike to Ovation, but the real shock is how chilly it feels as I bike into a headwind under an overcast sky. It's a month past solstice and days are getting noticeably shorter already, with it not turning light until about the time I show up here at 6.
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Conditions are considerably brighter when I emerge from Ovation. It's looking like a fair enough day that I decide I'll put in a couple of hours at the storage unit and then drive over by Chapman School, park the whale in a free parking zone, and then take an afternoon bike ride - maybe over to the Lents Flood Plain again.
It doesn't go like that though. When I get to the unit I survey the terrain and decide it's time to finally tackle the four large boxes labeled BOOKS, all taped tightly shut, as they've been for over seven years now. I start with the assumption that if I haven't seen any of these in over seven years I can live without most of them. I set a mental goal of keeping roughly one of every four books, sending three boxes to Goodwill and keeping one.
It doesn't go like that, au contraire. In fact I end up giving up only one box's worth, and that one is hard-won. Because of course these books are all the hard cases, and all the books I could stand to part with were jettisoned with the original purge. Each of the four boxes I open is exactly the same story as I look at covers and spines and titles that are a window into my entire time n the planet, all the way back to dad's favorite books that he passed on to me to love as he did, to my interest in being a creative writer or poet, to the army years and Vietnam era, to the Huxley/Peace Corps years, to the years when Carol and I were interested in communal living, to the years when I was interested in philosophy and the human condition, to my interest in travel, to my interest in Central Europe and first person accounts of life under authoritarian regimes, and to my lifelong passion for literature.
Virtually every title before me reminds me of where I was and what I was about when I see it again. So no, these will stay - and probably not be reduced further than the one box I manage to cull out, until someday we end up with some sort of place of our own again where I can hang them on the wall, look at them from time to time, open one up to read a few pages, and remember.
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Steve
4 weeks ago
I gave some thought about the guides of course, but ebird is better of course and neither of these was personal. They were fairly recen5 acquisitions, with no notes, checklists and so on. The one I regret is a predecessor lost on a sandbar on tillamook bay about 20 years ago that Did show a lot of history.
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But it makes for a long, difficult morning spent in a too hot space hunched over beneath a table with my knees doubled up or stretched out in a cramped space as I open the next box, shine a light on titles, exclaim in wonder at a much loved volume or forgotten favorite author, and make my choices.
I'm completely drained when I make it back to the unit and more or less immediately hit the bed for the next two hours, all interest in a bike ride having been baked out of me. Rachael's long gone when I return to consciousness, off on her 12 miler out Leif Erickson again. I drive over near Breakside Brewery because the car needs moving if we don't want annother ticket, and I indulge myself in another bratwurst sandwich.
Later, Rachael polishes off another chunk of her figgy pizza she brought home from Cibo and we retire to the bedroom to stream another old classic: the md ap Woody Allen/Peter O'Toole/Peter Sellers farce What's New Pussycat tonight, because after three downers in a row we're ready for some comic relief.
And in an odd coincidence the ones we watched on the last two nights, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Farenheit 451, were two of the first volumes to pop out of the first box I opened.
_
Today's ride: 4 miles (6 km)
Total: 230 miles (370 km)
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