Languid Beauty

 It was a beautiful day today; maybe a bit warm in the noon hour, but other than that perfect... I took a little stroll after dinner, and couldn't help but think in a few weeks... meh.  Anyways, it was my last Saturday running the OC, and it was...mostly fine?  The count was 112, seemed higher; we were more steady busy than anything, I think.  Lots of clothes went, as well as a good deal of the shoes we had accumulated.  All of the produce and bread went; maybe we were a bit aggressive in the beginning, but we couldn't leave it sitting around.  Plenty of volunteers, which was nice.  Towards the end of the shift the ops manager and I went around and looked at stuff to see if we could pitch it (after I sent out an email warning them).  We identified a file cabinet that could be shredded and purged, consolidated some shelves and drawers, and put the four coffee pots and two Keurigs together for a picture... I think we may be allowed to cull some of them.  Even getting rid of half the stuff will make it much neater.  Hell, we even consolidated the mac and cheese and got rid of the pallet, which freed up floor space.

Funny; I hit the gym after and then for most of the day I caught up on stuff -- did some food pantry administrative stuff, applied for jobs, filled out some grant forms, wrote some follow-up emails, and lo and behold, it was dinner time.  Then a nice stroll and back here to watch a couple of documentaries.  Very exciting, I know, but I did want to clean out some stuff and starting the process on some things is... wise; winter is coming and often it is better to apply now, and that is what I am doing.

Finished book 49 -- the one about the end of Austria-Hungary -- today, and all I could do was think of the line from Hemingway about bankruptcy; it happened gradually, then suddenly.  I still think today that maybe it would have been better if the state had survived; not only as a counterweight against Germany and Russia, but also because a trilateral empire -- Germany, Magyar, and Slav -- would have granted the various peoples of the empire various forms of self-determination within their own lands.  Such a plan was favored by Franz Ferdinand, which of course did NOT come to pass, but I can't help but think that all of the damn fool things in the Balkans (and elsewhere) would have been avoided had there been some semblance of a strong central state there.