I have been reading about Hurricane Harvey in the Globe & Mail and the New York Times, thinking about Maggie and grateful that weather problems in the parts of Canada where I have lived most of my life tend to be manageable with a shovel and the patience to wait for spring.

Here in Perth County, the weather is beautiful, the landscape is bountiful, and living is easy. I have eaten fresh corn on the cob every Saturday (after farmers' market) since we got here, and the fruit bowl is brimming with peaches just coming ripe. The other day, we had our first dinner guests, a local lawyer and her son, and managed to put on a decent feed despite the limitations of the kitchen and the fact that two thirds of our cooking equipment and all our stemware are still in boxes in the garage. The cats are happy, alternating between long lap sits and flinging themselves around the house with a fine, free, careless rapture.

We have four bookcases coming from IKEA (due in two weeks), but we will need more. We left five ceiling-height bookcases behind at the house we sold, fearing that they would fall apart if moved again, so after the move we had less than half the shelf space we had in Ottawa. Five 90-cm bookcases, each with seven shelves, adds up to a shortfall of almost 32 metres of shelving! That's a lot of books that we can't unpack for way too long.

But we have now installed the basement shelving, a task that involved moving many, many, unfinished pine shelves and posts out of the garage and down the basement stairs, where Himself spent at least two days with a crescent wrench in his hand. Yesterday, I worked myself to a frazzle hauling their contents out of the garage and down to the basement, asking myself with each container, "Exactly why do we still have this?" The exception was the large collection of CDs, which I packed into specially designed plastic boxes -- 13 of them -- after ripping their contents to our iTunes library. If I parted with those, it's entirely possible that Himself would divorce me.

Then I spent all of Sunday evening rounding up three weeks' accumulation of recyclables, ending up with ten huge bags of recyclable paper (almost all of it packing material), and our two city-approved recycling boxes brimming with bottles, cans, milk cartons, and those clamshell things too many foods come in these days. That done, it was time for the actual trash, which came to three huge bags. Stratford has a pay-as-you-waste trash system, and I'm already out of bag tags.

So I can now see large stretches of garage wall and almost half the garage floor.

Sur avec la guerre, as they don't say in France.