new room and bookshelf

With a lot of coworkers leaving, this opens up some rooms and I have decided to move right next door and get my own room again. This hasn't happened since October. One of the first issues I had to deal with is what to do with all this space. I now have an extra desk and a whole wardrobe. As anyone who knows me can attest, I love books. I have a dozen or so of my favorites and others that I have picked up while in China. In my new room, I first decided to put them on my second desk in a single row. However, while it looked good, it wasn't exactly a space saver and this desk was pressed against the radiator. Not a problem now, but come winter I didn't my (paper) books making contact with the (metal) radiator. There are many ugly metal racks about the campus (picture the kind used on a military base)but the requisition process to get one for personal use is long and just not worth it. So I went to Carefour and saw that they had nice looking four tiered storage compartments that would look pretty good and they were on sale from 144RMB to 98RMB.(about $15)
So with eager anticipation, I bought a kit, lugged it home and took out all the various pieces. The first thought to hit my mind was that I was definitely expecting it to be bigger. (that's what she said, btw ;) the second thought was that there sure were a lot of pieces to a simple looking wood bookshelf. I located the instructions and surprise, surprise, they're in Chinese with those maddening pictures and diagrams that make the Chinese characters look more appealing. "Oh well, come on!" I said to myself in a burst of pride, "You're American!...you are born with certain innate skills, among them being changing a tire, locating any Starbucks in a 10 mile range and most importantly assembling furniture!" Besides, I've been following in the footsteps of a certain Carpenter for a while now, so how hard could it be? With this resolve, I spent the next hour or so trying to put the 螺旋 into 孔数三 and connect 划分 A with 槽 B and finally managed to create something that looked at a passing glance to a decent bookshelf. The big test of propping it up and seeing that all the shelves were straight worked so I loaded it full of books and lo and behold, it's low and it be holding books.