My New Reading Chair! (and a few books)

(Why yes, this picture was taken maybe 30 minutes after I got up, so excuse the lounge wear and unkempt appearance: my excitement to show off my new chair overrode my desire to shower and look more presentable. lol)

As I said on Saturday, I found the perfect reading chair at Goodwill on Friday. I’ve been checking for a few months now, and my primary criterion was always comfort, primarily for my neck and shoulders since that’s where my fibro tends to concentrate. Other than that, I knew I’d prefer it in a neutral, and of course it needed to be clean and non-smelling (smoke was a problem with some other chairs I saw), but I was open to pretty much anything. And I was convinced that the universe would in fact send me a chair before we moved. So I’ve been popping by Goodwill every couple of weeks or so, to see if it had arrived. Imagine my surprise on Friday when I walked through the front doors, and saw my chair looking back at me! I sat down in it, and it was perfectly comfortable: I even discovered it was a recliner. Then I looked for a price tag, since my perfect chair would cost $40 or less, and couldn’t find one. So I immediately grabbed a worker to ask about the price tag. Apparently, if you want to buy furniture at Goodwill, you can take off the price tag and carry it with you around the store as you continue shopping, so the worker paged the store to see if anyone was planning on buying it. No one came up, so then I had to write my name and phone number on a hold tag, and wait 24 hours to see if anyone came to pick it up. If no one had claimed it, they’d call me and tell me the price. So I spent most of Saturday hoping a) no one would come and b) the price would be within my range. At 4:36, I called Goodwill (the 24-hour period ended at 4:30, but I didn’t want to seem too eager), and they said it was still there, that they had a gentleman pricing it, and they’d call me back. Two minutes later, I picked up the phone on the first ring and heard the price: $39.99. Yay! I might have actually squealed into the phone, and I told them I’d be there within an hour to pay for it.

Once I was at the store, I thought I might as well check to see if there were any bookshelves (there hadn’t been on Friday), and I found a little baby bookcase (five shelves, maybe 4′ tall by 2′ wide, of the cheap variety like my other ones) priced at $8. It was the perfect size for my library books & TBR spill-over, it’d fit in my room, and since it’s cheap, I wouldn’t feel bad about painting it to match my other shelves: sold! And since my Goodwill luck was obviously running high, I decided to wander over the book section. Normally, I avoid this area, since I’m trying not to acquire books right now, but inspired by home library thoughts, I decided if I found some books by favourite authors, they could come home with me (I set myself a $4 limit too). So here are the five books I found, plus three books that arrived in the mail last week (this pretty much never happens, since I very rarely enter contests or accept ARCs anymore). (And yes, I did have to use the flash, even though it’s noon: my bedroom gets NO natural sunlight plus it’s thunderstorming.)
From top-down, with my Goodwill finds coming first: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (I loved Fire and Hemlock), The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood (she’s been a favourite for years now), Seraph on the Suwanee by Zora Neale Hurston (I just read this, but that was a library copy, so now I have one of my own!), Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shayk (ok, I haven’t read this author before, but my library doesn’t carry this title, and it’s compared to A Handmaid’s Tale on the back), A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt (another author I’ve loved for years), Waterland by Graham Swift (sent to me by the lovely Shannon, John Crows Devil by Marlon James (an ARC sent by Akashic Books which I can’t WAIT to read since I adored The Book of Night Women), and The Tapestry of Love (Rosy Thornton’s latest, which she kindly sent despite me saying it’ll be awhile before I get to it, and which I wanted because I loved her debut Hearts and Minds).

So then I just had to wait until my dad could go pick them up with his pick-up, which he did yesterday evening. I haven’t completely set up my new bookshelves yet (I still need to add two of the shelves and then get the books sorted), and the chair’s rather wedged into my bedroom right now, but it shall be perfect when we move, and until then I have a comfy place to sit and read without worrying about someone wandering in and turning on a television. Bliss!

And now I’d better get back to Samba by Alma Guillermoprieto. Only I could manage to turn a post about a couple pieces of furniture into an 800+ word novel. ;)