May 22, 2011
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I have a new desk.This is how my office looked on an admittedly messy day with my old desk.
This was a kid’s desk which was second hand when it came to us and then was attacked with a pocket knife. Both my sons received pocket knives from their grandparents, but they don’t lead the kind of life that gives lots of opportunities for pocket knife use, so #2 son, whose desk this was, used it to carve up the desk.
I bought a new desk. I had been admiring it at Amazon for a year or so and the price went down to bargain basement levels, so I snapped it up. My husband, #1 daughter, her boyfriend, and I put the thing together on Friday afternoon when I should have been writing. It took about four hours, but it was fun. We’d see that something had been put on upside down and laugh in a jolly way and redo it, rather than cursing and taking a hammer to it, so I think that counts as fun.
Anyway, #1 daughter saw this as an opportunity to move all the furniture around, so here’s my new desk in the mostly moved around office.
There is still a great big ugly filing cabinet to move, and the plan is to put the printer on top of said filing cabinet and to get rid of the little table that currently houses it. I think the weird little shelf next to the real bookshelf probably ought to go, too once I figure out what to do with the stuff that’s on it.
The new desk is taller, so I should in theory spend less time hunched over while working, it has a cabinet for the CPU so I have some actual desk space, and we carried several bags of trash out of the room (old student papers, mostly), so there should be an overall improvement in my working life.
The drawback to this desk is that you have to
leave the cabinet door open when the computer is on. I normally don’t turn my computer off at all. I just put it to sleep. However, turning the computer off and shutting it up in its cabinet, and closing the keyboard into its drawer, may encourage me to create more of a distinction between my work time and non work time, which could be a good thing.I did take some non work time yesterday. I went down to the farmers market and bought plants, and planted them with my husband so they’re done right.
I did some sewing, read in the lawn chair amid the roses, baked banana nut bread, did the grocery shopping, and stopped by the fabric store, too. Then in the evening #1 daughter, her friend, #1 son, and I went to the symphony. Verdi, Rachmaninoff, Nino Rota’s 1966 ballet “La Strada,” and the William Tell Overture, which is one of the most thrilling pieces around, with bird calls at the beginning and the whole orchestra going completely crazy at the end.
The town I live in is such a nice town. It’s beautiful, for one thing, especially in May, and there’s a surprising amount of fine arts action for a town this size. Quite a bit of night life in general, actually. Friday night, the young people went out — #1 son’s band had a gig and his sister and her friend went along and then they went on to karaoke.
But we also have strange people out on the street. Last night, for example, we were accosted by a crazy but happy stranger who talked and hugged extensively while we all looked at one another in wild surmise trying to figure out just whose friend he was. Then, on the way back to the car after the concert, we found ourselves confronted by a series of people holding placards. These were not well-designed placards with pithy sayings like, “Repent! The end is nigh!” They had long, long things on them that were hard to grasp in a quick glance. Things like, “Sex outside of marriage is fornication and marrying divorced people is committing adultery. God doesn’t like this sort of behavior.”
Some people were thinking that the end was nigh yesterday, I’m told. Apparently, the Rapture was scheduled to take place at 6:00 pm. This didn’t happen. You can read about how it’s calculated here, though the end of the world has apparently been rescheduled for October 21st.
