My family and I have been social distancing for about a week now. Honestly, this has required very little from us. A few canceled social events, no music lessons, or dinner dates. We’re introverts by nature, my husband works from home, and the girls have been on Spring Break. So, nothing much changed, except the understanding that staying home is more necessity than choice and the girls won’t be going back to school next week (it’s closed).

All the same, I’ve had to fill my time. I have to consider filling more time in the future. My children and husband have found and are currently playing Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, a video game that apparently requires all three of them to fly and defend a space shuttle. I know nothing about it except they sound like they are having a blast.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent the entire day obsessively collating my Goodreads library. And I do mean all day. I began while drinking my first cup of tea this morning and have just finished. (It’s about 7:30 pm now.) Well, finished is maybe a stretch. I’ve come to a stopping point…a pausing point. It’s worth remembering that this is what my Goodreads shelves look like. And nothing goes on a shelf unless I actually have access to it. So, I own all those “want to read” books.

It might not be too much of a stretch to imagine I’m transferring some of my generalized Coronavirus stress into compulsive, all-absorbing, ultimately meaningless tasks. But let’s not go there. As I said, it’s not affected us personally in any huge way yet. But I think that yet is important.

I started by making sure all the books on my shelves have listed page numbers. It drives me absolutely nuts to not know what is a short story, novella, or novel when picking out something to read. So, I periodically do this; sort my library by page length and individually search out page numbers for any book coming up as unknown. It’s a slow process. (Why doesn’t everyone include page length when they upload to Amazon?)

On a side note, I cannot tell you how much it irritates me that audiobooks don’t get listed page numbers. I mean I get it, their audio files and don’t actually have pages. But I need Goodreads to incorporate some way to show their length. Need I tell you! All those unknown in a row that I can’t fix get under my skin.

Then, I moved from there to checking all the anthologies, compilations and boxsets I have. I found too many instances in which I had books 1 and 2 in a series and then a compilation of books 1-5, for example. There was a lot of deleting going on. And when I say delete, I mean I even went to Amazon and deleted it from my cloud. I no longer own a lot of single books.

You have to understand that deleting books is really hard for me. It’s not normal, the resistance I have to trashing a book (even a digital one that barely even exists). But there just isn’t any reason to own these books more than once, except that it was time-consuming to find them and consolidate my shelves. And I’m not going to pretend I found them all. But I found a lot.

I also deleted several anthologies outright that I’d picked up a few years back when anthologies were all the rage. If I haven’t read them by now, I’m not going to. There are actually a couple more to go. But at some point, I was organized enough to mark each individual book included in them. So, to delete them I need to track those books down and delete their listing too because I won’t own them anymore. But I put that off until tomorrow.

I found three books I suspected of book stuffing. This isn’t something you hear much about anymore and I don’t know how these three managed to survive on my shelves. Actually, that’s not true. It’s too easy for things to hide on my shelves. That’s part of the reason for today’s exercise in thinning. Needless to say, these were deleted.

All in all, I deleted hundreds of books. Soon…I have to work myself up to this…I’m going to go through and delete anything I’m no longer interested in. My tastes have changed quite a bit and there is a lot of detritus on my shelves that could go. But I need to read each synopsis before I’m willing to take the leap. And that will take a lot more time. Luckily, as I said before, I have time to fill in the near future. I’m going to make the most of being homebound.

Of course, I haven’t spent the entire week collating my Goodreads shelves (just all of today). I’ve spent quite a lot of time playing Overwatch.

I brought my support SR up to 2466, in case you’re wondering. (I only queue support/healer in competitive mode. No one wants to depend on my crappy aim, trust me. I main Moria, Lucio, and Mercy.) I’m never gonna make top 500 or anything. But considering this is the first shooter game I’ve ever committed to playing (and I’m a 43-year-old woman), I’m pretty thrilled to almost touch platinum.

I’m WondrousBeet6 on Xbox if anyone ever wants to play. I’m awkward as hell at first, but I promise it’ll fade.

Other than gaming, I’ve also listened to a ton of audiobooks while working on diamond paintings. This is the one I finished last night. I’m actually pretty thrilled with how it came out.

I have a whole stack of unstarted ones. So, I figure I’ll be putting a dent in both my audio library and my diamond painting stash.

So, so far so good. I won’t say anyone is accomplishing anything overly meaningful (though tending my bookshelves is immensely satisfying). But nor have we gone too stir crazy, which is good since we’re committed to this whole social distancing thing. I don’t really understand why some people aren’t. Of course, some people can’t and that’s another matter altogether. I recognize how lucky we are to be able to with so little disruption that I’m thinking about how to fill time, not how to fill bellies. But if you can stay home for a while, giving our health system a little room to breathe and maybe saving lives, please to. I’d be more than happy to spend some digital time with you if that helps.