Holiday Hiatus, Website Renovation, & Mold!

I meant to post this before the transition, but it got lost on my To Do list! Taking a break to soak up a little holiday spirit, spend time with my family, and recharge before 2026 arrives! I am sooo excited about the release of:

In other news, I was thrilled to find 10 boxes of books in storage, all waiting to be placed on my new bookshelves (with lighting that has not yet been finished). I opened them before touching any of the double-shelved multitudes on our sagging IKEA bookshelves throughout the house, and was horrified to find that the stored books smelled musty. Mold contamination!

and not the tasty kind….

Ironically, the worst case was a mold-edged book about the Okavango Delta that I’d received from a place we’d stayed in South Africa and then carried on our travels through Botswana and Namibia. A book about the Okavango, a river that disappears into the Earth instead of the ocean! How fitting….

And that book was snuggled in cardboard next to those related to philosophy, science, history, literature, literary theory, biographies, travel, etc. After inspecting (yes, under the dust jackets and along the edges) and packing them all back up in a panic (while wearing an N95 mask and gloves) and researching mitigation strategies for hours, I decided there was only one that was not replaceable (should I want to replace any of them): my 120-page seminar paper from a literary theory class on Walter Benjamin I’d taken while earning my MFA. I’d written it in the style of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. And yes, I’ll be replacing Benjamin’s book.

I cried, but ultimately I decided that we —my husband who volunteered to build a plastic-walled decontamination chamber involving a commercial dehumidifier, odor control with charcoal and kitty litter, and mold spore HEPA filtering, plus the manual cleaning that would follow— didn’t have the time, the space, or the resources to save several hundred books that have been in storage for ten years. So it was an emotional good-bye after the initial joy of anticipating their lives blooming once again on my shelves (instead of that blooming mold). Life goes on….

HEADS UP! – Websy Daisy has redesigned and moved my website to Siteground. Due to Jetpack and WordPress weirdness and migration to a new host, followers may have been dropped. If you find you’re not receiving my Perfect Picture Book Friday posts, please re-follow on this new site! It will still be the same URL. My apologies for the inconvenience.

I hope you have a peaceful, rejuvenating winter break! See you later in January, 2026!