Bookshelves and you--the beautiful music you'll make.

So, on a personal note, I didn't post Sunday--my usual blog-dump, because I did the manual labor. (Don't faint, Dears, I know I seem a bookish and pale sort on-line, an ephemeral, really, a veritable cybersylph--but in reality I am a sturdy and muscular creature--a "strapping lass", of the sort that has unloaded trucks and contemplated wrestling for a career. To envision me, I am as red as a birch basket full of poppies, blue-eyed, freckled, swaggering as opposed to flitting, a box of knuckles offset by an alarmingly intellectual dreamish face--a veritable steroid librarian. My days are well-spent toiling in vineyards and setting furniture to rights.)

Unfortunately, as I grow older and stagger towards the tomb--I grow less suitable for the manual labor. I approach the use of tools with an eye for the ergomonical and automated, my hands become more, should I say--purpilicious sausages, everyday and every way, and so--imagine yours, oh so very truly, building the RTA 3-shelf units for my ever-burgeoning library. Two of them. So, for the benefit of those of you who may have never attempted such a task, I will share my experience:

First step: Have money ready for your curse jar. If you have a curse jar. The phenomenon of spreading out pre-drilled bits of engineered wood may not immediately call to mind a plethora of ripe obscenities, but upon utilizing a screw-driver for its intended purpose for a considerable period of time and running into the possibility that holes allegedly pre-drilled in a substance allegedly yielding to a screwdriver--may be on both accounts less so--will provoke the average non-sainted mortal.

Two--get a screwdriver with a substantial handle--yes, I said handle. The larger the handle, the less likely you will be resting your poor opposable, evolved-primate thumbs, on a grooved and uncomfortable ridge--choking up on the bat, as it were. With a bigger handle, you can get a bigger grip, and also generate more of what the mechanical-minded call "torque". If you have a really good electric screw-driver--you can use that. While it works. And has enough charge to deliver the aforementioned--"torque". Not to be confused with a "torc"--a piece of jewelry, generally twisted, common with your Druids andVikings and Anglo-Saxons. I have a Bactrian battle-torc, myself, which was a kind of small, very specific, forearm greave.

Three--get on down to thefloor with your bad self. You will need to be on the floor to brace yourself, to spread out parts, and to have the appropriate leverage to deliver the aforementioned torque on the screws.

Four: have the instructions in front of you, even if they are just a page of stick drawings with unhelpful arrows and exegesis in French-Canadian. This happens to the best of us, and if we can't eventually sort out what an arrow was supposed to mean, we can't call ourselves really human. We have thumbs for no good reason. Spread out the pictographs, and do some inferring.

Five: put it together as logic dictates, and accordng to the amount of hardware the manufacturer thoughtfully provided you with. It should look mostly like what the picture on the box suggests, even if some screws do not go exactly all the way into their allegedly pre-drilled holes, and stick out a little, which also takes away from the stability of the piece, which stability rests on the tightness of the screws--yea, verily, the tightness of the screws alone.

But then six: finished, it is moved to itsplace of honor and you know how freaking heavy engineered board is, even if it's a long way from the tree it was--

Good thing to keep in mindnext thing you move, okay?

I put together two--moved both into a corner in my basement level den,and moved one wide unit upstairs. Much lifting and finger-smashing potential. I trust not all fingers which turn black will fall off?

Thus, I could not blog properly on Sunday.