Coffee table update; major apartment upheaval soon

Coffee table has been cleared off and cleaned. Next steps: sift, cull, and organize the stuff that used to be on and under the table and is now in a large cardboard box.

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After some recent trouble with the electricity in my apartment -- it's in a large house, built in 1886, that has not been very well maintained -- my landlord agreed to replace my horrid old refrigerator with a new one, and to remove the nasty wall-to-wall carpet which has been damaged by the leaking fridge. Overall this is good news, but it makes me anxious too: taking out the carpet will mean shifting around everything in here, and there are loose books under the bed, piles of stuff in corners, etc. It's all supposed to happen early this coming week, so I've got more boxing to do. I should get another box or two today.

It will be great to have a new or newish fridge, with a freezer that actually works. I just hope it won't be ugly brown like the last one, and I hope it won't be too loud either, since in this apartment the fridge is never less than ten feet away from me. It took ages to get used to the noise this old one makes, but by now it hardly registers.

I'm definitely looking forward to the carpet being gone -- I won't have to worry any more about getting it clean, for one thing, and though the wood floor beneath it is not in top shape, I think it will be easier for me to keep clean than the carpet was. ("ctrl-s, this implement, with the long handle and the bunch of straw-like stuff at one end, is known as a broom.") I plan to get a nice throw rug too, from Target or wherever.

Having the carpet taken out will also give me a chance to rearrange my furniture. Unfortunately I am bad at envisioning better ways to have it; this amount of furniture wouldn't be a problem in even a slightly larger room, but here there's just too much of it for the space, and not enough of it is storage-oriented. Wish I could put a few things in the basement, but das is verboten. I can't see getting rid of any of it, either. There must be something I can do. Any improvement at all will be wonderful, I tell myself.

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I also need to do two loads of laundry today, and finish washing the dishes that are in my sink.

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Saw a mouse in here earlier this morning. Not unprecedented, but very unusual for the summer months. WTF? There isn't any food lying around.

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Squalor Book of the Week: Down and Out in Paris And London, George Orwell.

These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a day or two—shocking, isn’t it?’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

The entire book is available online, here.