Thoughts from a store opening

Over 600 cartons of books opened in just about two working days. Most retained for the store, some for the self, and the rest put back in storage. Twelve hours of manual labour each day, opening cartons, sorting through them, and carrying them when needed. Carefully watching three managers argue the logic of rack alignment into its correct places, an empty green and yellow space metamorphosing into a book section. Co-ordinating with the main store for difficult customer orders and placating other customers who should have been called at least two days ago. Kicking myself for not seeing ahead enough.

Two more days of frenetic unpacking, categorization, rack alignment, and racking await my need to learn while for the last two I have been too exhausted each night to do anything to do much more than eat, soak my feet in hot water, and surrender to the dull ache in the bones. But you know the best part of each day? It's been a crash course in book categorization, especially of the categories I hate - self-help and management/business. The holes in my grasp on things seem smaller now.

Finding Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis at forty bucks when you know the full price is 440/- just makes all the tiredness even more worthwhile! It's the same edition, you know, in as decent shape. I'm going to post a whole list of books that I've managed to get for myself. I will endeavour - I promise you - not to gloat too much.

Booked!

Right, so Ideasmith's tagged me and apparently the rules are thus:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

Allow me to assure you that it's not quite as simple as it sounds. The trouble with this tag is that I'm usually not reading less than two books at a time. Not only that, I have the huge bloody guilt-inducing stack of unread — but browsed through — books waiting on my bedside table, baying for my attention. The third problem is that I'm having some trouble not reaching for the Tolkein or the Orwell (who is, incidentally, one of the nearest books around!) or one of newly finished ones and turning to beloved passages, uncaring if they are on page 123 or not. Or even if I type out the whole page instead of only three lines.

How, then, does greedy Extempore choose?

Like all great procrastinators, I'm going to to let a master, Mr Kesey, sort it out for me. I'm going with the book I'm currently reading instead of merely the nearest. I present lines 6, 7, 8 of Page 123 of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest .

"... Just raise that hand up there—"
"Fffffffuck da wife."
"Alright, forget it...."

I must admit, I would have liked the selection to be a little more illustrative of his glittering narrative, and indeed, prose skills. But I'm about 200 pages into the book and I see that it is much of indicative of the freewheeling madness, the careening randomness that I am coming to associate with this wonderful, wonderful book. By the by, I was supposed to read it at least a month ago, an activity the ex-reviewer and I were going to undertake together. But as it is with the best-laid plans of me, he's long done and I'm still reading it. Sigh...

And now to pass this on:

1. Geetanjali
2. Parth
3. Hyde
4. Nocturne

So there were to be five but I know only four!~

New Beginnings

I must admit, I'm pretty thrilled about today. It just might have slipped by without so much as a whimper, quite like last year, but I suppose not especially since I'm quite so pleased with myself. Thus, despite not wanting to say anything, it is with a rather surprised pleasure that E Vestigio turns three today. :-)

I could tell you about what a wonderful journey it's been and how much I've learned and grown. Which I have and made some wonderful friends too. Truth be told, I know that I'm still here because of a few of you. You know who you are so I'll suffice to say just that much only. And I must say, I *think* that my relationship with this blog isn't ambivalent anymore. But that's not what I wanted to say. No, no, not at all.

I wanted to tell you about E Vestigio — Photography from Bombay, India instead.

Starting a photo blog is when you realize just how how few really great photos you end up taking. Despite the zillions of photos that I have taken over the past few years, I see now just how many of them are a learning experience and how far I still have to go. I've been photo-blogging for close to two weeks and lamentably, unlike this one, the photo blog is one space at least that I update everyday. Some of those pictures you may have seen over the course of the last few years but some, they're brand-new!

Also, in the absence of a website of mine own and the limited posting capabilities of both Aminus3 and Flickr, I've started posting albums to Picasa Web albums. As you can see, I've finally stopped collecting! These are a chronicle of themselves, of things I thought pretty along the journey but not always of the journey. They may not all be "good photographs" but I hope you like them anyway.

*****

I posted one of these my first year and fell quite in love with them. This one's a lovely randomness of the events of the past near-year.

In want of a good home

This is Wheezy (female),

and this is Patchy (female),

and this is Brownie (male).

They currently live in the ex-reviewer's building and are part of a litter that originally numbered seven but because of human stupidity and nature's way, there are five left. The puppies are around two and a half months old now — these pictures were taken just a few days ago — and we're looking for homes for these three dogs because there are already between 5-7 dogs in the building and five more would be a bit much! More importantly, we'd like to give these guys a fighting chance at a good life, especially since Patchy has a bit of a bad leg. That doesn't stop her running around as much as the others though.

All three are very active and sweet tempered dogs who usually play nice. They're also in the process of getting all their shots and the such like. If you want, you can even meet the mother and the (probable) father, both of whom are extremely sweet, healthy, and good natured dogs. To be perfectly honest, we'd prefer people who have owned dogs before and we hope you won't mind when we ask you a few questions. We only want to make sure that the pups find a good home and are not re-homed after a few months because someone didn't think the whole thing through and then changed their minds.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd please tell as many people as you know in Bombay who'd be interested in giving any one (or all) of these a good home. You can mail me at evestigio[at]gmail.com and we can take it from there. And yes, in case you're worried about the names - don't be, They don't really answer to them. I just like calling them that. :-)

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Pictures courtesy the ex-reviewer - and that's only because I need to be at work during the day! I quite wish I'd taken the one of Patchy though! Sigh...