Weekly Wrap-up for November 28, 2010: Settling In, Illness, and Challenges.

It feels good to be back in the blogging world. With the chaos that was this past month, its great to be able to read blogs and catch up on everyone's posts. I think I'm pretty much caught up on old posts. You'll have to excuse my lack of commenting, but you all write too much. :)

In any case, we're still settling in to the new apartment. We have too much crap to put it bluntly. We can't really walk into our second bedroom as it is stuffed full of boxes. I suppose that'll happen when you lose 300 sq. feet of apartment by moving. But, we'll make it work (eventually). For now, the living room, kitchen, dining area, and our bedroom are put together and organized, so it'll work until we find some storage solutions, and decide to throw out some stuff that we really don't need.

One of the biggest storage problems we have is my book collection. When you have over 1200 books, they are hard to store. I have three bookshelves (2 large and 1 small) that are currently holding my classics as well as some favorite books. In addition, I have 20 or so boxes full of other books sitting in various closets in stacks. I really wish I could display them all, but there is no room. Frustrating.

I did decide that I need to purge some. I have a lot of big history books from my college days (I have a history degree-did you know that?) that I honestly will not read again. Perhaps it is time to part ways with them.

Anyway, things are going well in the new place except that I seem to be coming down with a cold or something else nasty. I have a slight fever and a sore throat, so I will be spending the next day or two drinking lots of tea and orange juice and nursing myself back to health. I hope it goes away, as I have a lot I need to get done! I don't feel like writing when my head's all fuzzy and I have A LOT of posts to write and edit.

I did sign up for 3 challenges yesterday. I feel I need to state again that I am not a huge fan of most challenges. But, considering I have that list of 250 books to get through, it is best that I find ways to motivate myself. As I get further into it, I know that I will be less and less excited to read those nasty books I decided to put on the list. So, I am using challenges within the confines of my own project to get some books read. And that's really the purpose, right?

Anyway, the three I decided to join are the Victorian Literature Challenge, the Special Topics in Calamity Physics Challenge, and the Shakespeare Challenge. I think that all 3 of these will push me through some hard titles faster than if I were doing it alone.

On Tuesday I am posting my recap of the month, so I'll give you more details of what I finished reading then. I have one more book not on my list to finish this month (The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls) before moving on to the Trollope book for the Classics Circuit and War and Peace.

Happy Reading!