Autumn is ycomin in

[melannen]

Spent most of the afternoon and morning working in the yard. I can't decide if it's awful or awesome that the black walnut tree is fruiting this year. We'll see what my opinion is after I've picked up another four or five bushels of mostly-rotten nuts. (Feel the burn in those thighs!) Haven't decided yet if I'm going to try to shell any this year or not - I did a bunch two years ago, the last time it fruited, and my fingers were this absolutely lovely mahogany color until mid-October. Then Mom, who has a vicious PUT IT IN TUPPERWARE instinct, sealed them up before they'd had a chance to cure and they all mildewed. Bah.

The squirrels get nearly all the good ones anyway. Anybody know how to tell a good nut from a bad before you shell it? Because that's a *lot* of effort for a very few good nuts.

Then I spent the evening shelving books on my LibraryThing.com account. It's not solved yet, but the remaining books are a lot more manageable now. (For those who haven't encountered me in hoard-brooding mode before - I live, with all my worldly possessions, in a 15x20 foot bedroom. Among those possessions: well over a thousand books. And I acquire new ones at a rate of about five a week, although in a good month I can easily do four times that. So it's a never-ending puzzle to get them shelved = good thing I love messing about with books! ATM I have eight separate bookshelves of varying sizes in the room, not counting the line of books across the top of my dresser, and I sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed with a reading nook on the bottom. For all that, the room's surprisingly open and airy when everything's stowed away where it belongs.)

So now instead of four tall piles of random recent books under my bed, I have a pile of classic literature and a pile of books on the writing life and a pile of books that might be relevant to my NaNo. And *everything else* is shelved, which I honestly didn't think I'd manage until about five minutes before I finished. Yay!

(Yeah - I know what I'm doing for NaNo already, mostly thanks to limyaael's fantasy rants. I'm starting a good month sooner than the last five years though, so hooray! No worries, though - I'm fairly well certain I'll just do all the worldbuilding and then give up on the actual writing a week in, like always.)

Comments

[birene [journalfen.net]]

Can't help you with the nuts. We had a hazelnut bush for a while, but all the fruits were either rotten or "taub" (deaf) as we would say in German for empty shells that don't even have a nut. I am totally jealous of the squirrels though.

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

We have a pecan tree that has produced one (1) nut in the entire thirty years my mom has lived here. :D

I would be more willing to try with the walnuts ('cause in nut years, the squirrels don't usually get them all) if black walnut didn't require (at minimum) heavy-duty gloves, a bowie knife, and a hammer and anvil in order to get at the nut.

[thrynrose [journalfen.net]]

I want to get all of my books on Librarything, but I am seriously lacking the motivation to actually do it.

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

I do it as stress relief, for when I have no motivation. It took me about six month to get the main collection in, and now that that's done, when I feel the need to procrastinate now, I either to a re-organizing of the shelves, or I pull out some of the books-in-family-areas that I haven't got to yet. (There's still two whole rooms of this house I've barely started on, plus the bookhelf in the attic that follows the entire ridgeline of the house. But I got all of *my* books in.)