Five Things On My Desk (VI)

I’ve cut my office hours, so my desk is starting to clutter again. Back when I was handling the children full time, I didn’t have a lot of time in my office(s), so I’d drop things onto the wings of the big corner desk I have, and the piles would get several inches high. When I had a full time contract a couple years back, the desk was pretty tidy. But the desk is starting to accumulate things on the margins, out of peripheral vision when I’m looking at my peripherals. So to shame myself I am pointing out some of them.

I could go with a list of five (or more) things I’ve already blogged about, including tickets and the playbill for Black Comedy, an Ideals, a couple copies of Battlestar Galactica and a drawing I got in Saint Charles, and even an Afghani currency I previously posted about in a Five Things on My Desk post from 2012 (although instead of a Trinidad and Tobago dollar, it’s partnered with a Somali bill that I don’t know where I got).

But, no, I won’t take the easy way out.

So here are five things currently on my desk:

  • A plaque with my hand print that I made in kindergarten.

    I kept it out while digging through a box of mementos because I thought about hanging it up, and I’ve yet to put a little loop of something to do so. As it’s been sitting on my desk, my children like to come put their hands in it, either to marvel at how much smaller than their hands their father’s hands once were or to free Mars.
     

  • A flier with support information for Windows 3.11.

    This has probably been carried along in a box for twenty some years; my mother had a Windows 3.11 machine that probably came to me when she upgraded, and I have a refurb laptop with Windows 3.11 on it even today. I think I have the installer somewhere around here if I ever get a crazy itch to install it again.
     

  • A Toys for Tots Foundation coin.

    It’s the strangest thing. This came in the mail with a fundraising appeal, and although I didn’t give them any money, I kept the coin. I dunno what I was thinking. The boys would play with it? Regardless, the boys are aging out of the part of their youth where they’ll happily play with some metal coin. Yet, I can’t throw it out. So it sits on my desk until the next cleaning frenzy, where I’ll put it in a box with other assorted tchotchkes.
     

  • A Paperboy handheld game.

    You hardly ever see hand held games at garage sales any more; certainly none of the electronic blip games from the 1980s. If any, you’ll find a little LCD screen game like this. I did, and I have yet to mount it on the wall. Sometime when I have a spare moment that I’m not wasting writing an inconsequential blog post, I’ll do just that.
     

  • Two Wii controllers.

    The children have brought these to my office because the battery terminals are corroded. “They have battery acid,” is how they put it. One of these days, I’ll get to it when I Set My Mind To It. Until then, they’ll rest easily underneath a pile of other junk.

Sadly, that only scratches the surface. But you can’t write much about a clean desk.

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