two nutcases.

marriage = not just the coming together of two lives, but the combining of two people's belongings & making sense of the mish-mash of possessions under one roof. it wasn't that difficult to be honest. it helped that tim came in with next to nothing & i came in with just a few boxes of clothes & books & bedding.

consolidating our closets wasn't too hard. we just threw out a bunch of tim's no-no clothes: ripped shirts, faded-beyond-recognition-of-initial-color shirts, overly baggy jeans, wife-beaters (i don't like them, yuck), etc. and boxed up a bunch of mine to give away. i get the lion's share of our small walk-in closet with space to spare.

organizing our kitchen was a piece of cake. we had nothing coming in, so everything we have is a product of the wedding (thanks friends+family!). i had a lot of fun putting things away & admiring our shiny new kitchen products (i love my bright red martha stewart le creuset pots and bright red kitchenaid mixer! lots of yummy foods have resulted from those appliances, so they're not just sitting pretty).

probably the one i agonized over the longest is the bookcase. i actually spent quite a bit of time staring at our boxes pondering the best homes & neighbors to give our books on the bookcases. things i pondered:

1. organize topically? i quickly saw the drawbacks to this. tim has java, surfing, coding, "data structures & algorithms" (snort, snort) books. i have cook books, tons of fiction books, random anthologies, book series, biographies....we have bibles, commentaries, references, children books, blah blah blah, etc. our christian books are not as difficult to organize - but we have doubles of many (who wants? scroll down to the end of this post to see what's up for grabs). AND they're all a hullabaloo of paperback and hardback, and bunch of different sizes. i GUESS it wouldn't be so bad to arrange it topically, but it would look so ugly, and i couldn't bear that.
   
   
2. organize by size and color? hahaha, i came really close to copying some super cute interior design blogs that had their entire bookshelf set up this way. it was beyoootiful. but curiously, most of our books are black, brown, dark burgundy, orange and yellow and purple..? ............i need to buy more pink, green, blue and red books to create the wonderful rainbow array i'm imagining in my head. oh, and magenta. i love magenta (darn you blogspot color palette for not having magenta & forcing me to use periwinkle). to buy a book for its cover, is that very bad? heehee. i will resist.
   
   
3. organize by genre? hm. is this the same as arranging it topically? not really? well, we don't have enough genres to do this. it would be...two big groups of books (christian, fiction). maybe three (how-to's/manuals). maybe four (biographies?). maybe ten (references, tiny books, science fiction? fantasy? historical fiction? crime books? textbooks? beep beep beep bop bop boop). i'm too indecisive for this.
   
   
4. where? the most shocking thing for me was seeing how many books tim had. i think i kind of assumed the big bookcase we bought would give me freedom to arrange my books in any which way with a little scootch room in between. nay =(, we've run out of room. where to put our books? hmMmm..
   
   
5. hm.
   

anywho, =] i did finally get down to brass tacks & i ended up having a grand ol' time shelving this beast. one side is meticulously organized, but i kind of lost motivation halfway, so the second shelf is haphazardly thrown together. heeheehee.

heh. heh. heh. and there's our big fatty television smack dab in the middle. we don't have cable, but we love watching movies on that thing.

sigh....i suppose at the end of the day, most of these things will only seem to matter now. what we prize will change, and what we carefully arrange will be discarded or swapped out for something new. i am enjoying God's many blessings given to our little family and even delight in them, but we joyfully accede that the only lasting treasure is the gospel. it repairs our marriage, and keeps us continuing on the same course, and causes us to grow.

double, double toil and trouble:

• instruments in the Redeemer's hands - paul tripp (cc)
  
• holiness - j.c. ryle (sw)
  
• recovering biblical manhood and womanhood - grudem & piper (at)
  
• the cross centered life - mahaney (jw)
  
• the grace and truth paradox - alcorn
• nasb bible (with writing in it)
  
• more to come - will update after we get the rest of our books.