Matthew J. Piette, P.E.

I have not moved too much in my adult life.  I moved into my first apartment in Milwaukee in 1986 on the South Side.  I moved to the tony Riverwest neighborhood in 1989 and stayed there until 1993 when we moved to our current digs in Wauwatosa.

As a result, I have not often had to rearrange books.  It’s much harder than you’d think.  Imagine all your books in a pile and you have to come up with a system of organizing them.  The obvious first sort is fiction v non-fiction.  Fiction is easier than non-fiction since the groups are more general: poetry, short stories, etc.  Within those groups, alphabetical by author makes the most sense, although I’m not much of a fan of alpha sorts.  That’s what you use when you can’t think of anything better.

My non fiction categories were harder.  Of course there is a math section, a history section, natural history section, but what about a micro-history section?  And how “micro” does the history need to be to qualify?

How the books look on the shelf is a consideration as well.

I have it organized reasonably well, but I’m still going and moving a book from one shelf to another.

I am reminded of when my brother Chas, who lived on 66^th St, once reorganized his books.  He gave us a bunch he no longer wanted.  Curiously, all of the authors last names started with “R – S.”

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It’s way to hot for Wisconsin in June.  The first part of this week has been in the low 90s and it will be today as well.  Tomorrow we get some relief with a high of 80.

There are those who like this weather, but we are not equipped for it.  Since we have radiators for heat, we don’t have central air and our house gets hot.  It was 88 upstairs at about 5:00PM Because Wisconsin houses are designed to keep the heat in, it takes a while to cool down.

We have a 12,000 BTU portable unit that keeps our bedroom cool, and that helps quite a bit.  But, we only have about ten more weeks to power through until September.  Come on, fall!

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