{"id":177,"date":"2007-05-16T17:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-16T17:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/?p=177"},"modified":"2007-05-16T17:46:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-16T17:46:00","slug":"remodeling-pause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/?p=177","title":{"rendered":"Remodeling Pause"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Our books have finally made it to their new home. They had been living in bags – lots and lots<\/b> of paper grocery bags – but we’ve finally gotten to the stage of settling things into their proper places. May I just say that it’s enough to make you feel human again, to have books upon shelves? And to realize that you have some nice books, books that you’re proud to own, let alone to have read at least once if not several times?<\/p>\n

You see, these are the beloved<\/i> books. These aren’t the books which live upon shelves in the office; these aren’t reference books, but books we have decided are worth reading again and again, and books which can be picked up, caressed. These are what really tell us that we’re home, and well, and make us feel wealthy.<\/p>\n

Yes – books make us feel wealthy. It’s strange, until you consider that we’ve had to sell books, and have suffered with their loss. The Riverside Shakespeare, the Riverside Chaucer: they went during the first year of our marriage, when we were living in a one bedroom apartment above somebody’s garage, and were lucky that one of us was working. We lived on spaghetti and jarred sauce; we sold our college texts, because they would get us through the difficult times. We heated the apartment with the electric oven and countless candles, and played cards for hours on end, betting with pretzel sticks. We had a black and white television, with a straightened metal coat-hanger for the aerial. We got all of three channels, one of which was FujiTV.<\/p>\n

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So, throughout the years, we’ve collected books to replace those beloved ones we sold; the Riversides haven’t made it back into our collection, probably because they sell for hundreds of dollars, and we didn’t like them that<\/i> much. We look back on that time in our lives, and know that it shaped who we are today. We still love watching Iron Chef – because we watched it on the little black and white set, subtitled in English. We love watching cooking shows in general, because we watched so many on that little set, and we were so hungry at times. Not that we were starving or any such thing – at least, not starving for calories, but for richness, and specialness. To feel wealthy.<\/p>\n

So, as we’re remodeling, we’ve pulled back into ourselves. And we’ve been dieting. And our things have been packed away, and we’ve had mess and clutter everywhere. And we’ve had a gimpy heater. So, in some ways, we’ve been waiting for the end, and experiencing a sort of gleeful rebirth as it’s come. I’ve been repeating the phrase, “nobody else has keys to our house” for several weeks now.<\/p>\n

And our books are home.<\/p>\n


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Our books have finally made it to their new home. They had been living in bags – lots and lots of paper grocery bags – but we’ve finally gotten to the stage of settling things into their proper places. May I just say that it’s enough to make you feel human again, to have books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany","category-remodel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}