tossing

Do you like boxes? I'm not taking about plain boxes although shoe boxes are nice, and very useful.  In the years before I had a career involving a lot of paper and also before I had a filing cabinet, I used shoe boxes. I wrote a guide for an insurance company to help clients keep  track of receipts, expenses, insurance, investments, income - all that stuff. I called it The Shoebox Guide and it was very popular because I'm not the only one who stores mementos and other essential files in a shoebox. I save useless boxes, too, until I find  a use for them. I have several pretty ones right now, empty but waiting. It bothers me to throw away a paper clip box because they are so cute. They would make lovely dollhouse furniture.

Years ago I made a darling 6-room dollhouse with 3 orange crates as the building, 2 rooms to a box. That was in the days when orange crates were made of wood.  It was in the summer and I was visiting my grandparents. I canvassed all my neighbours (mostly relatives) for bits and pieces to help me decorate the rooms: crystal beads for a chandelier, remnants of cloth for upholstery, curtains and carpets and - most useful of all - matchboxes (for wooden) matches, the kind with the sliding sleeve, large enough to make a sofa or a bed for tiny inhabitants.  That was long before Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers  (1952).  When I read that delightful book, and the series that followed , I really empathized with the small creatures and their borrowing habits, adapting odd, small objects to their uses. 

The point of my tangent was the box, the match box.  Did I mention  that I love boxes?

I feel pretty strongly about baskets, too.

penultimate?

I finished the extra chapter I realized I had to write. My timing is all wrong. I should be working on Christmas now instead of trying to squeeze it in.  We keep on making choices, don't we? I try to plan and budget each day, to get everything done, but the one thing I can't budget is my energy.  After a while I run dry.  Well, no one wants to hear all that.  The good news is that I've finished, sort of. I've already discussed sort of, so I won't go into that again.  Anyway, I have to read it now - that is, tomorrow - and see what I've said. Not just the chapter but the whole book.

I've always said it takes much longer not to write something than to write it. 

And then the marketing, oh, that's where the time comes in, trying to find the audience. I guess it will be easier with electronic publishing. I'm the one who has to learn.  Ah, well, tomorrow is another day.  And so is Monday.

This is a ridiculous blog, so I'll stop.