Scribbling in the Air

I'm moving real soon now.  While I don't have exact dates yet, I expect I'll be moving out of the apartment  the last week of August - to be accurate, the moving company will be packing and carrying everything down the stairs.  Notice for German apartments generally requires a calendar month, which explains the end of August, instead of early September.   Actually, notice for German apartments normally requires a three month notice, but when both parties agree to use the lease written by the housing office, there is a clause for one calendar month's notice when there are PCS orders.

I've got right at two months to get ready, and that includes time spent on  a three day tour of Bratislava, Prague and Pilsen in early July, and the seven day tour of Italy in early August that I'm seriously considering taking.  So figure about  6 weeks to wrap everything up.

So what did I do to prepare for the move this week?  I assembled a seven-shelf IKEA bookcase that's been boxed in the dining room for over a year. (It took two leisurely evenings to finish, so why did I take so long to get around to it?)  And now, in the process of moving books into it and rearranging the other bookcases, I'm attempting to put all the books into LibraryThing.  

I have a lovely set of rationalizations.  After all, I'm getting things organized so the books will be easier to pack, and then unpack and get up on shelves when I get back to Kansas. And just in case the whole shipment goes down at sea, I have a list of books and can try to get someone to replace them. (Of course the most important thing for me to inventory is my books, isn't that everyone's priority?)

But I keep falling down the rabbit hole.  The plan was just to put in the ISBN (I've even got the cute cuecat barcode scanner that's supposed to make it easier, but I could probably type the ISBN as quickly as it takes me to swipe the barcode  two or three times to get it scanned in)  I'm pretty much avoiding the inclination to tag everything.  But if there's any reason to open up the record..... then I tag and tweak and wonder if I've got time to reread this title right now.

And then there's the whole organizing on the shelves thing.  My general classifications are SF/Fantasy, Mystery, and Other Stuff.  In a perfect world, I'd have enough book shelves to shelve everything alphabetically (single rows, no stacks) in those categories.  In reality, I tend to try to sort out the hardcovers from the paperbacks.  But then I get to the authors that I have a real mix of format, and sometimes multiple copies.  I prefer to shelve them in their own little area.  And if an author writes SF/fantasy and mystery...  all their works are likely to be shelved where I'm most comfortable looking for them.  Asimov's mystery stories are always shelved with his SF. An idiosyncratic system, but it seems to work for me.