Saying goodbye…
June 28th, 2009
I’m welcoming a new sofa into my rooms next week. I picked one from Leen Bakker on Saturday, after spending considerable time trying to find a decent second-hand sofa. I changed my mind about what model I want and decided to try my luck at the Rijneke boulevard with its many furniture stores.
It’s funny how that works: the first sofa I saw in the first shop I entered was the one I ended up buying after touring the stores for 90 minutes. At least I’ve seen all the available options (and some unavailable options too—seriously ugly sofas and seriously expensive ones). The sofa on the right is the sofa I picked, except mine will be in a light brown colour and its configuration is mirrored.
The sofa I have now is going to move into the study. And that is where the goodbye in the title of this post comes from. To accommodate it I’ve had to empty two bookcases and cram the remaining books into three bookcases. It basically meant getting rid of about half my books, magazines, and whatever else has slowly accumulated on these shelves over the last few years.
Now, some of my books are crap. Some of them are technical and out of date. Some of them are old and of little value. These were easy to dump on a pile to throw away (see picture). But there were also books that weren’t crap. I decided for every book whether I really wanted to keep it or not. So I made a second pile of books to either give away to Borderline Books or sell to De Slegte. I’ve also promised a girlfriend she could pick books from this second pile before I sell them or give them away.
Throwing away these books was hard and painful to do. And it wasn’t just books, either. I started building a model of the USS Enterprise D in 2004 (from Star Trek), and I’ve spent considerable time painting the damn thing and drilling tiny holes in the windows of the saucer section for lights. But I last worked on it in 2004. It’s been gathering dust ever since. I threw it away.
Getting rid of all this stuff was hard sometimes, but I like having a more selective library that is better in quality, and I suppose I’m just glad I won’t have to look at that half-finished model of the Enterprise ever again. It’s good to say goodbye sometimes and create free space in your library.
My name is Marco Hokke. My blog is about the things that interest me and things I might forget if I would not blog them.
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