Getting by

Here’s how my dining table looks right now (sans laptops).

I still haven’t collected all the items — the last batch of holds will be returned on 7/16, so I’m planning three trips.

To get through all 78 items, I need a plan. The first constraint is when an item needs to be returned. As you can see, I sorted them into piles by return date: each pile has an orange post-it note has the date written on it.

BUT, library items have two special properties: they can be renewed, and they can be held. However, if a book has a hold on it, it cannot be renewed. Obviously, if an item cannot be renewed, it should have a higher priority than a book that *can* be.

With this in mind, I sorted each pile into renewable and non-renewable, with all the renewable books below the orange post it (and all the non-renewables above).

What this means is that I can (for now) ignore the renewables, enabling me to process, over the next 21 days, 24 items.

Given that a couple of items are complete seasons of TV shows (e.g. No Reservations, Heroes, Veronica Mars), one might conclude that I’m still fucked.

So what else is new?