You know that series of books about giving a mouse a cookie or a moose a muffin? Where one small thing sets off a long, interconnected chain of events? I feel a lot like my life is one of those books; I can't do anything without it being like knocking over a domino, or worse, having it require four more dominoes to fall before I can do it.

Maybe it's just me?

Anyway, my weekend started off with me giving a moose a muffin -- to wit, the library book sale I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. My house was already overflowing with books, to the point that we had them stuffed in random places like between the bookcase and wall, and on the floor under the serving table. However, a family-wide stomach virus on Saturday meant we went to the sale late on Sunday, just around they time they started lowering the prices until they were selling by the box. It was not a recipe for only getting the few books we intended.

So: We had several boxes of books around, on top of the overflow we already had. We bought some extra book cases so that we would have a place to put everything. But before we could utilize them, we had to find space. At the same time, the little dog we were taking care of had her own bout with an intestinal bug, so we thought it would be a good time to give the carpeting a long-overdue shampooing. And since we were doing that, we thought we might as well clear everything out of the two carpeted rooms, throw away what we didn't want, and reorganize with what we kept. Which, of course, led to rearranging the entire house, because everything had to be shuffled around.

An entire (impromptu) redecorating project, in other words.

Towards the end of today, the kids were not only clad only in underpants, but they were the same underpants they had all been wearing (exclusively) for three days, and were taking all of their (delivery and/or fast food) meals on the porch, because there was nowhere to eat in the house. My husband's eyes had swollen practically shut from all the dust that lurked in books and furniture that had seemed reasonably clean.  And I'm sitting here on the couch in my sparkling clean, prettily redone living room and looking around the rest of the house, which looks as though a twister touched down inside its walls, because, after all, one weekend is not enough time to tackle a project this size.

At least we have a couple more days to put things back in order before we go out of town for the holiday weekend.

In the meantime, I managed to thin out my book collection to the tune of three big books and several shopping bags, and I'm going to take them to a used books store to trade in. I'll probably end up with quite a few more books. And, if I'm going to get some more books, I could really use a few more cases to go with them . . .