PaperbackSwap.com

The WMD and I are big readers. He so more by force than choice these days and me so blissfully by choice (said after completing four years of an English/History degree). In fact, in the last two weeks, I’ve read ten books. Granted four of those were the (I’m ashamed to admit) Twilight series books, which took me all of a day to read.

I am a huge fan of our county libraries. They have a wonderful online system set up in place that allows me to search for, request and pick up books once they’re in at the nearest library. Best of all, I get three weeks to read them. I don’t remember the check out being that long when I was a kid.

However, the downside to this system is that when a book is really popular, I might be 250 in the queue (as with the Twilight books); meaning, 250 people are ahead of me in line to read the book. At the three week check out rate, it’d take me 15 years to be at number one. So, needless to say, if I really want to read some books, I’m going to have to buy them.

However, the drawback for us is that we live in a teeny, tiny house with no storage space. Zero. While we do get attached to books, we’ve had to learn to be ruthless and clear them out on a regular basis. Usually, we just donate them to a charity. However, I recently stumbled across PaperbackSwap through another blog and may have found my new mode of choice for both procuring and getting rid of books.

PaperbackSwap is a free (for now) membershop site that allows members to post books they’re willing to get rid of in exchange for credits that will allow them to “buy” books other members are looking to unload. Upon sign up, all new members get two free credits, which is equivalent to two books. The only cost involved is that you have to pay for postage when you mail the books you’re getting rid of. But, this balances out when you receive a book from someone else and they pay for the postage.

So, I took the plunge yesterday and listed twelve books (both paperback and hardcover. The site name is a bit of a misnomer.). I took six of them to the post office to be mailed this morning. Once the recipients get them, they mark that they were received on my account and the credit is added to my account. I’ll admit that I’m a bit nervous that they will actually follow through with this, but the site is well established and has a system to prevent this. At the least, I’m out the $2.50 it cost to ship the book since I would normally have given the book away anyway. At best, I’ll get six credits added to my account for future books that I can’t get from the library at all or in a timely manner. We’ll see how it works out.

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Should’ve been a librarian…

 

 

Now, I don’t know what child rearing experts would have to say about this, but it worked. Not only did we read a whole lot to get the toy we wanted, but my brother and I both developed a deep love of reading. In fact, one of the things Matthew and I had to, erm… “straighten out” when we first got married was the fact that I need to read for at least thirty minutes before bed (although these days that translates to whenever my eyes shut, which is usually ten minutes into my nightly reading). This routine also stems from my parents’ tricky-tricky parenting methods. I wanted to stay up late as a kid. My parents told me I could stay up half an hour later, but only to read. Therefore, I read.

I’ve always had a love of libraries. The books, the possibilities, the trivia, the knoweldege, the stories- all at my fingertips! However, since I moved to NC three years ago, libraries have been a thing of the past. Instead, I’ve either read what I can online or bought the book from the store. But that gets expensive and we have no more room for books in our teeny, tiny home. In fact, we have several boxes of books in the shed crying out to be rejoined with their brothers and sisters in the house, but there’s just not any room.

I don’t know why it’s taken me over two years of living in Wake County to finally get a library card. The local library is a mile and half from our house, it’s on my way home and it’s open until 8pm Monday through Thursday. Not to mention the fact that it’s part of a great county library system and is accessible online. Did you know that you can actually go online with your library card and reserve a book? The library will contact you when it’s in, wrap it up in a paper with your name on it and put it on a special shelf in the library for you to pick it up. I had no idea. Did you know that the library has self checkout, like the grocery store? They even ask if you would like the due dates stamped in the book or just printed out on a receipt. Hello 21st century! This ain’t the library I grew up with. And best of all, did you know that you can check out up to 99 books at once? 99 BOOKS! For three weeks. THREE WEEKS! And you can renew online! ONLINE!

Library, where’ve you been all my life?

I really should have been a librarian. From the time I could read (and probably before that) I spent countless hours, days, weeks hanging out in the library, reading almost anything I could get my hands on (I’ll admit that the tax books and auto repair books didn’t really rev my engine. ha-ha.). I think it probably all started when my parents bribed my brother and I to read. Yeah, that’s right, they bribed us. You gotta problem with that? See, in the summer time, when school was out and my parents faced potential mutiny on the homefront by bored children, they figured if they could get us reading, they could subdue us. And it worked. If we read a certain amount of books, we got a toy we wanted. I forget the number now and I forget the toy, but I do remember the posterboard chart on the side of the counter lined with a grid drawn by my mom. Every time we finished a book, we got to put a check in one of the boxes. So many books read and we’d get some sort of reward.

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OBX, here we come!

Sorry I haven’t posted much in the last two weeks. I spent last week catching up from my week in Wilmington and this week getting everything completed to go on vacation next week. We are heading with several of my family members to the Outer Banks. I love, love, love the Outer Banks. We are renting a big house on the ocean in Salvo, which is in the southern portion of the OBX, so it’s very non-touristy. As of this morning, the forecast is calling for high seventies to low eightes and partly sunny. Perfect!!

So, in the next week I plan to:

Walk on the beach as much as possible (our house border Hatteras National Seashore, which means there are ten miles of unspoiled beach out our back door)

• Take lots of pictures
• Sleep in every day
• Read books
• Do puzzles
• Eat lots of good food, including some freshly caught seafood
• Love on my family

I will not, however, go in the ocean. First off, it’s probably freezing this time of year. It’s also full of sharks. Not really, but I’m serious, yo. Just ask Jennifer. She knows sharks.

This will be a much needed rest for all of us, particularly my family from the North, who will get the chance to thaw out after a long, cold, snowy winter.

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100

Well, this is it, the 100th post. It took me a little under a year to get here. Some people do that many posts in a month. Not me. I like to take my sweet, old time.

I’ve been thinking about how I would mark this blog milestone (You did know this is a blog milestone, right?). It’s popular among bloggers to post 100 things about themselves. I don’t really like that. For multiple reasons. Do I have 100 things to say about myself? Do I have 100 things I want to say about myself that I want the public to know? Does the public even want to read those 100 things in the first place? To all of the above I say a resounding, “No, please and thank you!”

I also considered giving something away to someone who leaves a comment, but, we all know that I like to make promises of giving stuff away and then never really follow through. You don’t hold me accountable people! (Oh, and Lindsay, I didn’t send the card, BUT, I’ll be sending me in less than a week! Will that do?)

So, instead of posting a laundry list of dirty laundry (the little voice inside my head warns me that what is recorded now will come back to haunt me in my presidential future, right Hillary?) or making promises I won’t keep, I’ll just say thanks, y’all for reading. I’ve enjoyed the blogging process so far and plan to keep on doing it. Even though this blog was born out of an idea to track a Yankee’s perspective on Southern life which then morphed into keeping track of home renovations and then to photo logging, I’ve comfortably settled into just writing whatever floats my boat. And people still read. Even more than when I had a “plan.” You like me, you really like me and for that I thank you!

(Oh, and I L-O-V-E olives- any and all, shape, size and color are of no consequence. They’re all good fruit to me and thus the little muses for my photo above. Plus, they’re part of a little side project I have going on, but I won’t talk about that for now.)

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