Creating the Deaf Jedi Archives

You may have noticed that once again I have missed self-imposed deadlines for posting. Here's why. My wife has become more and more insistent about getting our second bedroom set up (wives do tend to get insistent from time to time, you know), so I have begun the laborious and time-consuming process of finally cataloguing my library, which currently sits on the floor, woefully unorganized, pending the purchase of bookshelves. I took a gander at this Library Thing doohickey some of you guys like to use and found it a bit confusing at first glance. So Library Thing is out until, perhaps, the future. So I palled around with Word and didn't see anything I liked. Then I opened Works and in their database program I found a very nice book inventory template. So I will be filling out this database (unless any of you can turn me towards something just as simple but better) for the next few days. I'll give you a final count (grand total, categoric total, author total, etc.) when it's all said and done. Which reminds me that I still have several boxes of books leftover from college sitting in my dad's garage with the rest of my things. I need to get those up here as well, and then I'll have all of my books together. I have decided not to catalog any works of fiction (with the exception of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and just maybe my copies of The Lord of the Rings). The reasoning behind that decision is simply this: in the event of a fire, which books am I going to replace? Tricia and I knew pretty quickly we weren't going to repurchase any fiction in the apartment, whereas I would set out almost immediately to rebuild my theology and counseling acquisitions. That's significant, because I'm leaving out my Star Wars collection. But I suppose the $8 Puritan Paperback copy of Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor is much more valuable than my mint condition, autographed copies of the novelization to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, each purchased for about $25. That's right, mint condition, autographed by Terry Brooks himself. In about 10 years they'll be worth 20 times what I paid for 'em on the collector's market. But in 10 years' time, I'll be teaching our children the finer points of Divine Providence from having read John Flavel than how to lift rocks using your mind from listening to Yoda, and that is a trade of eternal value. What has this week taught me? A blogging lesson I keep forgetting to learn: don't set deadlines. Just do it at your own pace and have fun. A lesson we all can appreciate, especially as summer winds down and we start to get into the school habit again, for those of us still at Southern.