Ugh. Shifting

Weeding is done, and within the timeframe I set for myself. Wheeee! I've spent yesterday and most of today shifting the non-fiction collection. Now that it's been pared down a bit, I should be able to make room to display my biography collection a little better.

For non-librarians, shifting is where you move books around on the shelves to make room elsewhere, or to consolidate after a weeding leaves big blanks on the shelves (as in my case). Sounds easy, right? Riiiight. This is how it goes.

Pick up a handful of books; move them to where they go. Repeat. Individually, the handfuls of books weigh somewhere between half a pound and three pounds, roughly. Not so bad, right? But you do it again, and again, and again. And the books aren't just moving laterally. They're moving from above your head to down around your ankles, or vice versa. They're moving around corners.

And the moving them isn't even the tricky bit. The tricky bit is holding on to the books you've just placed while you reach for the new handful. If the books you've just placed fall down, they can slip out of order, get lost in the back of the shelves (my shelves are not "real" library shelves; they're about two and a half times as deep as they need to be. Stuff gets lost back there), fall off the shelves onto the floor (or your toe). But you also have to be careful when taking the new handful of books, because the shelf you take from can have all those things happen to it, too, if the books there fall down. And when the shelves are right above one another, it's not so bad, but when they're in completely different bookcases...well, it's a nightmare of Herculean proportions.

And then, I neared the end of the shifting, and saw that I hadn't quite done enough to free up the shelf space that I needed. So I went back to the beginning, and shifted again, and got almost to the end, and saw that I was still going to end up with about 20 books that still needed a home. I started to do just a bit more shifting, but eventually I threw up my hands and said a great big "screw it!" My shoulders hurt, my arms hurt, my neck hurts. I feel like someone's been pounding on my upper body with a big stick. I am going to vegetate at my computer for the last half-hour of school today, because, by God, it's Friday. I am going to spend the weekend lazily reading the new books I picked up yesterday, plus the ones waiting for me at the library. And I am going to do my best to not think about the fact that I have to start inventory and textbook check-in next week.