I pack; they ship

All of my books are gone. All 1,187 (or so) of them. And I miss them. They are all wending their way to Manchester on a pallet, wrapped in shrinkwrap, in a container, stuffed into some giant boat. I know I'll get them back, but it's really difficult to have all of them out of my reach.

I'm glad I found a (relatively) cheap way to ship my books. I do need them with me, not merely because I'll need some of them for the PhD program that I want to enter, but because, more than anything else, my books carry little bits of my past around in their pages. I figure that the fact I only own ten boxes worth of "anything but books" makes up for the fact that I will be carting twenty-plus boxes of books around for the rest of my life.
Of course, because I felt lonely, I went out and picked up a few (three!) used paperbacks. I needed the company!