When I returned home after another long day, I found a package slip waiting in the dirt-verge just outside my front door. Sure enough, it turned out that my UPS man had delivered a mysterious square box--which I soon realized was not mysterious at all: it contained the two floating shelves I'd ordered on the weekend so that I could get some of the feet-high piles of books beside my bed up off the ground. Now, here's a sentence that might make you giggle: because one is supposed to mount these units directly into a stud, I dug out my studfinder and my drill and got ready to work. For a long time, I believed that my studfinder was somehow broken. A couple of weeks ago, though, I discovered that I just didn't understand how it worked, how its magnet responds to the nailheads in a stud, and how you have to be careful to track down the level at which studs have been nailed if you want the finder to make its little demonstration of joy that you've found what it's looking for.

Tonight, armed with that knowledge, I soon had two stacks of books suspended, one above the other, on the wall beside my bed, into which I climbed soon after, and where I am soon to be sleeping soundly.