I've been attempting to clean out my room. Yesterday I did my bookshelves. I own too many books, but I don't like giving them away, especially if I had some emotional connection to them at some point in my life. However, I have managed to get rid of enough to actually fit all my books on my bookshelf which is a very weird thing for me. I don't think that has happened since we moved.

I didn't find any of the books I was particularly looking for (Yann Martel where are you. Julia Whitty come home) but I did find three "Complete Works of Shakespeare" and two "Complete Sherlock Holmes." I put one of the Sherlock Holmes collections in the donation box (the gilt one, because I enjoy giving my books a rough time of it and you simply cannot do that with gilt leafed books) and distributed the other two Shakespeare around the house. I don't know why our family has so many Shakespeares and why they all ended up in my room but I do know that the one thing you don't do is mess with copies of Shakespeare so I put one in my mother's room (it had her name on the inside, anyway) and one in the living room (it was gilt leaf copy).

Cleaning out my room is a bizarre thing because I hang onto bizarre things and then forget about them and then they get all piled up and then I'm left wondering why I have so many plastic dinosaurs on my windowsill. I am halfway through a filing cabinet filled with, primarily, mementos (papers! what is my love affair with paper!) of my middle school years. I don't know why I saved any of it. Middle school was a uniquely horrifying experience. Tomorrow I will try to remember to talk about some of this rubbish; there is something very sweet about the britpop cootie catcher I have got in my hand. But there is also something very wrong about this list of boys my friends had crushes on that I, for some reason, saved, even though I apparently had no great contributions. But that is for tomorrow and anyway I'm only halfway through - who knows what horror of youth I'm going find in a minute.

Yesterday I came home on a airplane and summer started officially. My family picked me up from the airport. My father said, "you look thin!" and then he said "do you want to get some Mexican food?" and I thought, "it is good to be home!"

Our family went to get Mexican food in San Jose and then we went to a pet store because we thought there might be kitties there, but instead, there were many birds and one puppy. The cats were hidden in another room. After that, we went to a bookstore and I looked at poetry and my father bought a hardbound copy of Life of Pi by Yann Martel in hopes that this lovely, illustrated version would compel people to return the book to him after they've read it. He bought me The Art of Reading Poetry by Harold Bloom which I am very excited to read. My sister and mother did not buy anything, but my sister is still in school.

Today Bryn and I set up this blog, but today isn't over yet so I won't report on it.