Stacking the Books - A Cautionary Tale

It just figures. I finally have a day where I can do all manner of books things, whatever I want to do and I end up spending the day in bed. Here's what happened.

I woke up yesterday with a mission, just sprung out of bed with a project all planned out. I had purchased some eBook versions of some physical copies I own on Friday. Upon waking Yesterday, the first thought in my head was that I needed to get the physical copies out of my TBR piles.(Yes, I have more than one.) So, I took the pile of at least 50 Tshirts of my book stacks and the pile of pajamas. I also removed most of the books off my nightstand. Then hubby said, "Let's go get some pancakes."

Original Pancake House has THE best pancakes I have every eaten, so I will never say no to pancakes. We came home, it was still early as we made it to the OPH for lunchtime, and I was still feeling energetic.

I have this thing, as I'm sure most people do, but when I get stressed with things pressing down hard on my shoulders, I find it best to have a lie down and play Minion Rush. I've been having a lie down for about two months. But I digress.

Anyway, yes, came home, I looked about the place and decided it was time to get the rest of the Christmas decorations boxed up. (Don't judge.) My house has 9 rooms counting the bath and a half. Out of all those rooms, only four have an overhead light; the two bathrooms, the kitchen and the dining room. Especially in the winter, it is hard to do any major projects or cleaning as it is already dim by the time I get home from work. I have to leave that kind of stuff to the weekends. Unfortunately, the weekends have been full of errands and other such stuff, so I've been working on the take-down of Christmas slowly.

Yesterday, I had had enough. I couldn't go into March with Christmas still up, so I worked all afternoon and finally got everything boxed up.

I love garland. I have strands of garland for every holiday. There was a mound of holly, poinsettias and other winter foliage that I decided to take upstairs into the attic. This was probably around 8pm, maybe a little earlier. Can't recall. I went up into the attic and found that in the free space where I need to put the Christmas stuff, hubby had moved a stack of his boxes, so I had to drape them elsewhere for the time being. The only spot I could find was where the spring garland was laying out, so I decided to take it downstairs. I would put it up later during the day.

Now, you are probably wondering where I am going with all this. Please forebear.

As I was coming down the stairs from the attic (It's a walk-in attic.), I slipped on about the second stair. My right foot kept sliding down about three steps while my left foot stayed behind and bent behind me getting caught up on the railing. My head, unfortunately, slammed into the wall, made worse because I was wearing my glasses on top of my head. It took a few to be able to get up, but let me rest assure, I suffered no serious harm.

I was feeling the impact, though, and decided I was done with the steps for the night. However, I could not lay down because the foot of the bed was covered in flattened out Tshirts and my side of the bed was covered in books. Before I could have a lie down, I had to put everything back in order.

So, I reclined on the floor and went through my stacks of books. There are four rows of books, four stacks deep and they are piled as high as the window frame. Not only did I want to move the books I now have on Kindle, I also browsed and flipped through some of my ARCs and decided to move some to the get rid of pile. These were books I knew I was never going to get around to reading.

I am trying to clean up not only my wishlists, but also my TBR pile. I probably took about 30 books off the piles I am never going to read and about another 15 I know have in eBook format.

Finally I was able to clear off the bed so I could lay down. I didn't sleep well. I have bruises on both sides of my hips, the right much worse than the left and somewhere in the middle of the night I awoke with a skull splitting headache, which has persisted all day.

I slept on and off until about noon, took some migraine Excedrin and the headache went from skull splitting, to throbbing and finally to a dull ache. Other side effects? Vertigo when I move my head too quickly and a queasy stomach for much of the day. As it turns out, me + slippers + stairs = disaster.

If I hadn't started the day motivated to actually accomplish things starting with the books, I never would have boxed up Christmas or taken the garland into the attic or pulled down the spring garland.

So, the moral of this story is: Don't try to organize your book stacks or you will get concussed.