Putting things into place

Every time we prepare for Howard to attend a convention, we box up stacks of books into easily portable boxes. These boxed then get carried to the convention. When the convention is over, any remaining books get reboxed and hauled back home. Once back at home, we shove the boxes into a corner where we won’t trip on them because we’re too tired to unpack them completely. Also there was always another convention coming soon, so it seemed logical to leave the books boxed. But when we’re prepping for the next convention we invariably discovered that when packing from the previous convention we not sorted the books neatly by type. So it is faster to just pack up fresh boxes.

I’m sure you see where this is going. We’ve been accumulating boxes of miscellaneous books for months. This has made our work spaces cluttered and made inventory very difficult to count. Today I started finding all those boxes and sorting the books into the appropriate inventory stacks. The job is not done yet, but already I feel much better. Once I get all the inventory sorted, I’ll do a thorough inventory count. This will allow me to make sure that the inventory listed in my tracking programs actually matches the physical inventory. It won’t. Anyone who has tracked inventory can tell you that things randomly turn go missing only to resurface months or even years after you’ve written it off. There are promo books that we’ve handed out that we forgot to record. There are shirts which, upon further inspection, turned out to be damaged. Sometimes the kids decide to read one of Daddy’s books and grab on out of inventory rather than searching for the one on the shelf. Inventory wanders. Now it is time for me to find it all and figure out how much we’ve got.

Inventory is not the only thing I’ve been putting into place. I’ve been to the gym twice in the last week. I’ve started paying attention to what I eat. I swept a mass of toys and dust out from under the front room couch. Convention season is over. The book shipping is over. I now have time to put everything else back where it goes.