Brown Paper Packages

Some women go to Cozumel or Napa for girls weekends, we have…the book sale!

For the first time ever we have documentation of the adrenaline flowing as we waited in the foyer for the doors to open on bag day.  It was one of the best bag days ever; even a few hours into the sale the tables were still covered with books, many of them books I wanted to pick up.  I owe that in part to the fact that I didn’t see anyone with scanners mindlessly grabbing books for resale and Kellaura and Amber only reported seeing two.  Historically, I see those people and I want to 1) roll my eyes 2) break their scanners 3) push them, grab their bags, and run them over to the “changed my mind/please put these books back” area.

Amber also documented a packing moment-

Oh how I love bag day.  After hours of wandering tables and selecting books, the moment when I sit down to pack them as tightly and efficiently as possible into my $10 brown bag is one of my very favorite things.  I crammed in 50 books this year, my personal best.

I found things I was looking for (a concordance to keep in my nightstand, a big vegetarian cookbook), children’s books (Standing Up, a fabulous book about a boy learning to pee standing up after being inspired by Manneken Pis in Belgium), a stash of fiction, adventure non-fiction, books the might be helpful in the future (Caring for Box Turtles – how long before Rush and Tate start coming home with turtles they found?) and books that inspire me to be my best self. 

I picked up a SAT prep book that is basically a mini-dictionary of 1,505 words that I should know, but I tend to forget their definitions.  I find it completely hard to remember the definition of adjectives that I see often in print by rarely hear used in conversation, like misanthropic (hating mankind, by the way, if you also have a brain block against that word too.)  It literally took me until last year, and only after looking up the word in the dictionary a thousand times, to remember that the word bucolic means charmingly rural.  Because doesn’t bucolic sound like an infections disease? 

I also fit in a guide to de-cluttering and organizing your home and I read the whole thing in one night.  We’re on our way to a streamlined home!  Full disclosure, I did leave behind a huge book called “How to Organize Everything” because it was going to take up way too much valuable space in my bag.  The book looked really anal anyway and probably wouldn’t have worked for someone who brought home about 70 books over the course of two days.  Or someone who is not even sure exactly how many books she brought home.

I put away the kids books and cookbooks, plus a few more, but I’m keeping most of my books in the brown bag by my bed.  It’s my attempt at both drawing out the excitement and focusing on reading these books, as I’m sure there are still a few unread finds from our first book sale trip in 2007 scattered through our bookshelves.  It’s already been a week, but every time I pull out a new book, it feels new.