Sunday, March 11, 2018

Finding some "fun" in a Sunday
desk cleaning

Because roughly 95 percent of our lives involve assisting entropy, I needed to spend some time today on the other 5 percent — combating it. My desk was a mess, which likely comes as no surprise to the readers of this blog.

So I figured I would at least liven up the work by unscientifically documenting the items that were piled atop the old desk. I hope this doesn't make any of you who are compulsive cleaners itchy, but please consider this sentence as your trigger warning.

Here's the list of Things That Were (past tense!) On My Desk:

  • An old Easter postcard intended for my April 1 Papergreat post
  • 11 writing implements
  • My wallet
  • My great-grandmother's 1910 travel diary
  • 3 comic books I bought this week
  • 16 items that I recycled
  • 10 items that went in the trash
  • 4 books that need to be reshelved
  • 1 "Save the date" wedding notice
  • 13 sheets of blank letter paper, some gold, some yellow
  • A small stack of recent Postcrossing arrivals
  • 2 pieces of junk mail (these also overlap with the recycling tally)
  • 10 pieces of ephemera that I already blogged about and are now in need of forever homes, here or elsewhere (this number does not include already-blogged postcards)
  • DVD of the 1990 version of Hamlet, for Ashar to watch
  • Atari Flashback Portable instruction manual and charger cord
  • A ¾-inch stack of family photos including the alarming one shown at right
  • 11 unused index cards that need to return to their proper spot
  • Ratty envelope full of all my stamps, used for mailing things around the world
  • Small brown spiral notepad that's mostly filled with lists
  • Postcrossing letter from Russia that's full of ephemera
  • 22 postcards that Ashar and I are using as launching pads for our stories
  • One measuring tape
  • 1 large paperclip
  • Sketch book containing, among other things, a drawing of a nude Vincent Price with a tattoo on his buttocks
  • Old-timey photograph, from the York Fair in the 1990s, of me with a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey
  • 2 Valentine's Day cards
  • My LNP work schedule for March 11 through April 7
  • Multiple sheets of return-address labels
  • Dover Youth Shakespeare Academy program for The Tempest
  • An index card with my sister's new address
  • The postcards for the long-neglected Part 2 of a Papergreat Coney Island post from last year
  • OrangeMite Shakespeare Company program for Antony and Cleopatra
  • 1 Story Supply Company notebook, partially used
  • An elaborate and musical Merry Fishmas card
  • Penn State themed "to/from" gift labels
  • A baggie containing a snippet of Coby's fur
  • A description card for my nifty Location Earth dog tag
  • A 3¼-inch tall stack of postcards. So many postcards! Some were already blogged, some are for future blog posts, and some are for mailing.
  • A 2½-inch tall stack of miscellaneous ephemera to consider for future Papergreat posts
  • An old to-do list, dating to last summer, on an index card; scrawled on the back are notes from a weird dream I had
  • And, sadly, a huge stack of Real Life Stuff: Tax paperwork, estate paperwork, bills, and such. I'll dive back into that tomorrow, I say, in my Scarlett voice.

So here's the "after" shot of the desk. Progress has been made and fun has been had. Sounds like a successful Sunday.

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