The final mortgage payment was made early this month – thirty years and never missed or had a late payment. Yes, the light at the end of the financial tunnel, bright and so very, very restful. And it also meant that late this month I could purchase a couple of nice-to-have items, one of which I had been considering for quite a while – to whit, a Sodastream unit, to make carbonated beverages. I’ve never really liked soft drinks, but I do like plain carbonated water; no sweetener, no flavorings. The bottled kind tends to go flat almost as soon as the bottle is opened. Although the plain unflavored HEB house brand in aluminum cans is acceptable, the cans take up space on the shelf and in the recycle bin. A couple of years ago, we tried out a countertop unit that made carbonated beverages, (A freebie from Amazon Vine) and it was ok, but the CO2 cartridges were expensive and didn’t really last very long at all – so, back to the drawing board. I had heard good things about Sodastream, not the least of it being that they are made in Israel. So, I ordered a Sodastream package from Amazon which came with three one-liter bottles, two CO2 cartridges and two small bottles unsweetened cherry and lime flavors. A couple of days of use and I am pretty happy with it. The CO2 cartridge attached very easily, the bottle of cold water hooks up readily, and you can choose three degrees of bubblization. Now as soon as we go through the last three cases of HEB-brand bubbly water that my daughter bought because there was an offer to buy two, get the third one free – we’ll be Sodastreaming, exclusively.

The other semi-frivolous purchase was a bookshelf… you do know that we have a lot of books? Yeah, I was scrolling down through a friends’ FB page, and encountered a short video ad for a tall, six-level rotating bookshelf, which supposedly could hold 300+ books, while only taking up a small amount of floor space. Well, my attention was grabbed. The house is small, the existing bookshelves overflow as it is, what with the collections for research,  general history,  Texiana,  books for pleasure reading, those copies of books published by the Teeny Publishing Bidness, Wee Jamie’s overflowing collection … and one of the bookshelves so designated was an inexpensive folding number that I bought in Greece which has begun to fall apart. And that corner of the home office was in a horrendous state anyway … So, I found the exact same six-level rotating bookshelf on Amazon and ordered it. Putting it together was a bit tricky; it took the efforts of both of us and a stepstool. While it’s constructed of thick bamboo panels, there are reinforced panels and lots of flat-head screws connecting all shelves and the upright panels. I’ve loaded in all the levels, starting at the bottom and so far, it’s holding up well. The unit only occupies a small footprint, relatively speaking, rotates easily enough, and each of the six levels holds anywhere from 35-25 books. (More, in the case of very skinny volumes, less when it comes to brick-thick doorstoppers like J. Martin Hunter’s Trail-drivers of Texas.) Swapping out the old bookshelf for the tall rotating shelf meant reorganizing the existing shelves, rearranging stuff, throwing away things like owners’ manuals for appliances which had long since worn out and junked, or been given away … and turning up odd items, like some letters from my grandmothers posted to me in the early 1980s, an envelope of photo negatives processed at the AAFEs in Greece, and a Laura Ashley home goods catalog from 1986. No, I’m not a hoarder. I just loved the Laura Ashley English country cottage look. I kept that catalog as a memento and wish that I had also saved out some ‘80s Banana Republic catalogues. I loved the original,  high-quality Banana Republic items, and their catalogs were literate and fun to read…

I am already thinking about another rotating shelf…