I have three loads of laundry in now and I need to reload my laundry card before I can do any more. Looking over the piles in my bedroom floor, I'm guessing three more loads. Who knew I was such a dirty person? (Seriously. Doing everything at once, rugs, comforter, towels, sheets, and clothes, makes a lot of laundry).

Sigh. I've started the Great Tidy-Up of '07. Cleaning out the stuff I've allowed to accumulate on table-tops over the last month, smug in the knowledge that soon I would have time to deal with it all.

Bottom line? Books. More books will have to go. I have six bookcases in my bedroom, an over-the-door bookshelf on the bedroom door, two rows of books lining the 10' linen/storage shelf in the bedroom closet, and three boxes of books stored in the floor of the closet. I have no idea how many books I have in storage, but a conservative guess is 6-8 large cartons. Although it will wring the very lifeblood from my heart, it's time to clear some of them out.

Some will wring less than others.

Those Gemmell books I talked about recently. I can Goodwill those without a qualm.

The Robin Hobbs books I just finished a few days ago. Nine books I read. About 7,200 pages. And then the ending was just stupid. I'm tempted to write a warning note inside the flap of the first one, but not everyone reads critically.

You take a chance when you trust an author--if they're writing a long series, you fasten plot points and things that seem to point to major character development in your mind as you go and trust that they'll make sense of it all, that the author is going somewhere with it all in the end. With the Hobbs books, it's not that I didn't care for where she went with it. It's that I discovered on the last page that she hadn't been going anywhere in particular. I can't believe I wasted two weeks of my life on that. (Also? If you spend 2000+ pages writing a love story between two characters? Having them wave bye-bye and go off to their separate ways with barely an angsty qualm? Will annoy your readers. If you're going to separate them and they're not going to care that much, don't bother with the love story. I don't require a love story in the books I read, but if you include one and make it the centerpiece of 2000 pages of writing, it had better matter.)

(If I buy make-up from my local Walgreens drugstore and I don't like it? I can return it for a refund. Why can't I return a book that turns out to be stupid and get a refund?)

A handful of airport books can go. (The kind of stuff you buy in airports when you're desperate for something more to read after they announced the third hour-long delay of your flight. That sort of thing. I carry a lot of books with me when I travel, but it takes a lot of books to give me enough to read for five or six consecutive hours.)

Books I read and enjoyed but would likely never read again. Cook's Tour, for example. The Way of All Flesh for another. Many books are readable, but they're not all re-readable.

Sigh. I'd allotted myself one day to do my cleaning and tidying. Tomorrow I need to get onto the job-hunting trail. Looks like I'll be spending the intervals between reading ads and responding to them in the actual cleaning I didn't get to today.

I just checked my work email, as I agreed with Bernie I'd keep doing this week, only to find that She has gone in and changed the layout and suchlike. I sent Her a polite email essentially saying, "keep yer mitts to yerself." It bounced. I tried again. Bounced. Now I gotta decide whether or not to call her and warn that she needs to clean out the spam account.

Decisions, decisions....

Ohmigod. She just IM'd me. She can't get Word to open a txt file She created with one of their proprietary software programs.

30 seconds of troubleshooting and I find that She just changed the document extension and assumed that's all she needed to do. The brain. Boggles.

Her resume claimed extensive familiarity with the standard office software programs they use, including the Microsoft suite and QuickBooks. She lied.

Last week, She had me show Her how to create an invoice in QB three times (you click the button that says, "invoice") and now She doesn't know what file extensions mean?

Then She wanted to know how to get to the relevant folder on Her hard drive. That you could change directories in the "file open" dialogue box seems to have surprised Her.

She was saying She couldn't get into this or that program today because She forgot Her notebook with the passwords She'd written down. I had to remind Her that I left Her three indexed notebooks with URLs, passwords, user names, and everything necessary.

Bernie? You hired an idiot.