day 14: act of faith

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by Janice on 03/03/2012

If “A library implies an act of faith” (Victor Hugo), then does choosing to eliminate your personal library define one? I love my books and they generally reflect where I have been in my life, good or bad.

The non fiction books outline our journey from struggling with infertility to struggling with a colicky child to struggling to find a career that worked after I became a Mom. Even the junky paperbacks I bought online, when I was too exhausted to read anything else (colicky second child + 20 month old first-born = very little sleep), remind me that I was sometimes able to carve out restorative, quiet moments to myself. Today, I tackled the remainder of the books that were in the stash under the stairs, and MJP helped cart them up to the garage for donation. Given his recent support for bootcamp, I have decided it’s time to stop referring to him as Crono.

I spent 2 hours going through them and have 9 boxes of books. Just found out that The Reading Tree will do residential pick ups for large book donations – yay! Day 14 in bootcamp was intended to be paper scraps (excluding office related ones). Our stash under the stairs included both of our magazine collections, which are set to go to the North Shore Recycling Depot.

While I was sorting them, I counted the books in my personal library stash, assigned a (low) average cost to them, and came up with the current tuition rate for 1 year of University.  If that didn’t reaffirm my faith in the purpose of this project, and refocus my determination to break the book buying habit, I’m not sure what else would. These are just a few of the treasures I found buried in the sea of boxes:

  • A 1925 edition of Mansfield Park that my Grandfather had received as a Christmas gift from his then girlfriend, Mary Agnes : ).
  • A 1925 edition of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh
  • My copies of the Laura Ingalls books (which my 7 year old has started to read as I write this).
  • And these books on women’s history in Canada.  My sister is currently mapping the many generations of our family history in Canada and was quite excited to receive these:

The stash under the stairs also included VHS tapes. We had two boxes of old tapes. The Disney movies we kept as we still have a VHS player that works. London Drugs Green Deal Recycling Program accepts VHS tapes, but will only take 16 at a time so we’ll have to stage the drop off for the remainder. Other than the tapes, I sort of skipped day 13 from bootcamp, where the target was movies and games. We are pretty good with this one, and pass along DVD’s we aren’t using to other families. I also don’t want to have Crono appear when we are making such great progress – DVD’s and games are as important as music for him.

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