Reply #32: I wanted a better look at her house, so I

[tblue37]

Googled and found better images:
http://www.theolympian.com/news/story/158109.html







VIDEO TOUR of house:
http://www.theolympian.com/multimedia/story/157692.html


Remember Steve Martin's "Get Small" routine? Well, a science fiction writer (I no longer remember which one) wrote a story entitled "Getting Small" in the 1970s or 1980s in which a young married couple decide that to save money, one of them (the husband) will have to "get small"--i.e., make use of newly available technology to shrink to Tomb Thumb size, thus saving enormously on food, living space, etc. But as he experiences being so tiny, he also changes, becoming more philosophical and meditative.

The article I link above indicates that this woman, as a consequence of "getting small," has undergone profound changes, too, in the way she thinks and in the way she feels about everything.

I find these tiny homes charming and daydream about living in one. It triggers my childhood fantasies. But the woman had to give up owning books and start using the library. That would be hard on me. I am a writer and a teacher. I don't know if I could live without having immediate access to my own books, though my daughter made me let go of about 600 of them 2 years ago when she came to visit me and help me get my apartment in order. We donated them to the local public library, which has a "Friends of the Library" sale each year to raise money to supplement its operating budget.

I was traumatized by having to give them up, though I must admit that it did open up a lot of space in my tiny apartment. I won't claim that I haven't bought some more books since then, but I try to keep the impulse under control, and if a book is just one I bought for fun reading, not because it might figure into my research on one or another topic, I go ahead and give it away to a friend who might like to read it, or I release it into the wild" (see “Book Crossing,” at http://bookcrossing.com/) for the serendipitous enjoyment of a perfect stranger—though even that is hard on me.