Colonel Mustard with the Candlestick

I'm happy to report that our library in our new house is just about complete. In all honesty, I have absolutely no excuse to procrastinate.

My prior excuse was that I needed a space to spread out my work stuff and be able to walk away at any time and return at leisure. It's strange; it feels like we just discovered a whole new room of the house. Before the "librarization," the dark, unused room was full of heavy, quasi-collapsing boxes containing our collective 11 years' worth of college books.

What, you thought I was going to throw away that textbook from Psych 110? I paid $156for it back in the day (and that's, like, $3,208 in today's dollars).

Almost all of our furniture is used, we've never thought it very important to have matching decor. Anything that matches in our house is purely through luck and creative garage sale negotiation. But we couldn't find three bookcases to match, even on Craigslist, so we decided to bite the financial bullet.

The other day, Jack ventured out to one of the local furniture stores and bought bookcases, kitchen table and chairs, and an over-stuffed chair for the corner. We hung thick, dark curtains on the windows so we can hunker down and work when necessary. He wants the library to look old and philosophically-inspiring. I asked if we should artificially cover things in a thick layer of dust and write by candlelight with a quill and inkwell. Everything is dark wood and I think Jack wants to replicate the library within the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I wonder which books qualify as the restricted section?

I didn't study anything very risque and my most scandalous book is along the line of The Last Temptation of Christ. I was curious to finally unpack all the books from undergrad and take a quick inventory of the books I supposedly wrote papers about at Saint Mary's. Back then, I remember thinking that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Leibniz' metaphysical Monadology would look cool on a book shelf.

Then again, so do books like How to be Happy, Dammit and How to be Pope. (Thank you to Kant Think, formerly known as Epistemological Doorknob and her husband, Mr. ED). It was strange and weirdly unsettling to unpack all those books. It opened up an emotional Pandora's box, as we both felt the need to flip through books we haven't seen in a decade.

Jack would also like to put one of those wall decals on the wall, stating some lofty, Socratic quote that would motivate us to achieve the professional and intellectual advances we so desire.

Me? I'd like the wall decal to say, "Sit your a** down and work!"

All this talk about the library is making me want to play Clue. Hmm. I wonder if they have that for Wii!