100 de-bleated goats

On Thursday evening, I FedExed my mark-up of the copy-edited manuscript of Breeding (that's its Amazon page!) back to the copy-editor.

It is hard to feel any sense of accomplishment or completion, as I will still have to go through proofs and make the index.

(The index for my first academic book took me in the region of 65-70 hours to complete, so it is a fairly substantial job, even with some help.)

But the page for the book at the Columbia University Press website looks very lovely to me, as does the cover design (especially the demented little monkey?!?)....
On Saturday I bought a little shopping cart and a lot of boxes and packing tape. On Sunday I returned c. 150 books (my copy-editor would say "ca."!) to the library--I have not photographed 'em, I felt the number would be sufficiently illustrative.

(One of the ones I could not bring myself to return was this. The title caught my attention in the stacks one day when I was looking for something else, and in fact I am definitely going to read it soon, I am contemplating an insane secret-history-of-the-twentieth-century-type project and I've got a stack of Philip K. Dick and assorted other lovelies awaiting my not-the-next-thing-but-maybe-the-one-after attention...)

I also packed up (it was the lazy person's version of the job, I did not stop to sort things properly, I will deal with that at some unspecified point later on when I unpack!) twelve boxes of books and papers that have been basically strewn all over my apartment for transportation to my office--this is a postponeable job, I am thinking they are just going to sit here in boxes for a while now...--and culled from the shelves a fairly large number of books that I will now dispose of to the fellow who sets up his table in front of Milano Market.

(The shoe- and bike-type clutter is an unavoidable byproduct of the triathlon craze....)

(The book situation round here is fairly Tribble-like....)
There is some more sorting-and-ordering to be done--for now I have thrown a large heap of papers into a box, but I must go through this afternoon and see what's in there and make everything either tidy or thrown away.

Also I need to rearrange all the furniture.

But I am well on my way to making the apartment tolerable to me as a writing environment--it is true, I am slightly having to fight the impulse to throw away all the furniture and actually get rid of 80% of my books, we will let that await some future state of full(er)-blown mental insanity, but it is looking (in the parts I have not photographed) nicely bare...