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books can aid household insulation Thursday, January 18 2007
The bookshelf that I'd built for Gretchen was four feet wide, 86 inches tall, and had eight equal-height shelves suitable for books no taller than 9.25 inches. That last spec turned out to be a bit of a problem. My plan had been to make a shelf suitable only for poetry books, which (in Gretchen's collection) tend to be smallish paperbacks. But it turns out that poetry books cover a range of sizes and Gretchen likes to organize them alphabetically. In the end, though, she found a solution to the problem my shelves posed: she put the few oversized books out of order on the topmost shelf, the only shelf with open headroom. It turned out that the shelves were fine for most of the books. The planks I'd used for the shelves were so narrow (about six inches) that I had to use metal brackets to attach the bookcase to the wall.
The new bookshelf caused Gretchen to launch a massive book reshuffling throughout the basement. It replaced a somewhat smaller shelf, which we moved to the main guest room. I generally like to place bookshelves against outside walls so that the books can aid household insulation. A bookshelf like the one I'd built last night, with so little empty space above the individual books, seems like it would be particularly good for this purpose.
For the past day or so I've been suffering from another inflamed salivary duct, this one at the mouth of the duct running from my left parotid gland (it empties into my mouth from the inside surface of the cheek near the inside bend of the lower jaw bone). I could be wrong about this, but I suspect the infection has something to do with all the peanut butter sandwiches I have been eating lately. Peanut butter mixed with masticated bread tends to lodge in the trench between my molars and the flesh of my cheeks. Bacteria civilizations could possibly flourish in the environment, eventually irritating the nearby salivary duct.
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