Closing in on the end of the year

This is going to be brief because it is already tomorrow. I seem to have been busy all day, but I'm not sure what I really accomplished. The box update:

Twenty-four boxes of books in the hall, twenty-four boxes of books.... Assuming that I can subtract 24 from 28 correctly, that means we took 4 boxes down today and looked through them. There are 3 empty boxes in the dining room, so I guess that means I made some progress. However, there are various piles of books around, including these on the kitchen counter:

These are all books we will most likely hang on to. In the middle pile in front, under "The Hobbit" are two complete sets of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy by Tolkien. One was the Wizard's before we met and the other was mine. The offspring and I were talking today. Turns out that each of them has their own personal set of these books. I wonder what that says about this family .... but not for long.

There is also an almost-complete set of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries and quite a lot of Stephen King, along with an assortment of beloved children's books.In the various discard piles are many more children's books, some of which were also beloved -- but I have to draw the line somewhere.

You may recall that the Drama Queen has five days in a row off from work and that she had 25 boxes sitting in the hall waiting for her to go through them. Today was her second day off and here's the box situation in her hall:

That is only the first pile that she has tackled -- and only 3 boxes are gone from the pile. So, by my calculations, that means 22 boxes are still in the hall. And she only has 3 days left. I'm not exactly sure what will happen at the end of those 3 days, but we need that hallway to be navigable.

As I mentioned before, it is already tomorrow, but here's what is going on in our dining room right now:

They don't go to bed! They come home and stay up all night Skype-ing and AIM-ing and FaceBook-ing and stuff like that. I suppose if we didn't provide computers for them, they wouldn't be able to do all those things. Without computers, they would be forced to stay up late at night reading, just like I had to do.

Last, but not least, the large Wallaby sweater is progressing. I was tooling along when I suddenly remembered that there was a pouch that needed to be knitted before reaching a certain point. So I took a break from knitting the body and started the pouch, which follows the same rainbow-striped pattern:

And now to bed. Tomorrow the Visiting Cousin catches a plane and heads home. I'd better get at least some sleep before taking him to the airport in the morning.