Cleaning my office
We are waiting for a big shipment of guns to arrive in a few days, so in the meantime efforts around here get focused on straightening up and getting ready for the next week. I am a very disorganized person when it comes to my desk and my "things to do" file. If it weren't Louise and Wendy, I'd be buried in paper and completely unable to function.
Last Friday, Louise gave me a lecture about all of the wreckage on my desk and told me that she was going to whip me into shape. That's kind of funny to me, because I know what her desk looks like at her office and it isn't any better. "Physician, heal thyself!" I thought. Nonetheless, I decided to make an effort to rake things up in here and surprise her when she comes in on Tuesday.
The first step was to clear away the stack of books on the "hangout" chair next to my desk. The hangout chair is where folks like Paulie sit when they come here to hang out. Since it is the closest flat spot to my overflowing desk, it is where books from the shelves end up when I need to look something up to answer a customer's email. Of course, when Paulie shows up, he just scoops up everything on "his" chair and plops it onto something else, regardless of the number, age or frailty of the objects on "his" chair. His behavior (moving stuff to random places) mixed with mine (being lazy about putting referance materials away) leads to total chaos of paper items and makes it hard to find certain books when I need them.
Weekends are slow here, most of our customers seem to call from work during the week so their wives don't catch them. Therefore, the phone hardly rings at all on Sundays and I can work uninterrupted on a task like this. The only time I had to stop so far was to go feed the critters.
I'm making some big headway at the moment. My current task is to clear a set of shelves on which my collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century clay pipes was diplayed on. (I've got well over 100 clay pipes, the oldest being circa 1580) It's not that I'm tired of looking at my pipes, it's that I need the shelves that they are displayed on to house books.
As we unpack more "stuff" that had been stored in the garage, I'm finding more and more militaria stuff, books etc.. I've also been accumulating more as time goes by. From my chair I can see no less than 28 historic hats and helmets ranging from WW1 to the Gulf War from 11 countries. Most of them are displayed on styrofoam heads. The oldest are a French Adrian helmet from WW1 and a Camo-painted Doughboy helmet said to have been worn in the Ardenne forest, the newest is an Iraqi National Guard hat. There are flags ranging from a bloodstained "meatball" flag with a prayer wishing for the success of the Japanese soldier who owned it, to the 48-star flag that graced my uncle's casket, to a Kuwaiti flag from Desert Storm. There are representative shels and ammunition ranging from an 1884 dated .45-70 cartridge to a 25mm shell casing from the bushmaster canon of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Iraq.
It's pretty cool to think that all that is left to do to get the museum built is to build the structure as we've already got the artifacts to fill it. I guess cleaning your office can be fun if every pile of "stuff" to sort contains another treasure.
All I know is that Louise will be pretty surprised when she comes in on Tuesday and can actually find my desk! OK, back to work...
Last Friday, Louise gave me a lecture about all of the wreckage on my desk and told me that she was going to whip me into shape. That's kind of funny to me, because I know what her desk looks like at her office and it isn't any better. "Physician, heal thyself!" I thought. Nonetheless, I decided to make an effort to rake things up in here and surprise her when she comes in on Tuesday.
The first step was to clear away the stack of books on the "hangout" chair next to my desk. The hangout chair is where folks like Paulie sit when they come here to hang out. Since it is the closest flat spot to my overflowing desk, it is where books from the shelves end up when I need to look something up to answer a customer's email. Of course, when Paulie shows up, he just scoops up everything on "his" chair and plops it onto something else, regardless of the number, age or frailty of the objects on "his" chair. His behavior (moving stuff to random places) mixed with mine (being lazy about putting referance materials away) leads to total chaos of paper items and makes it hard to find certain books when I need them.
Weekends are slow here, most of our customers seem to call from work during the week so their wives don't catch them. Therefore, the phone hardly rings at all on Sundays and I can work uninterrupted on a task like this. The only time I had to stop so far was to go feed the critters.
I'm making some big headway at the moment. My current task is to clear a set of shelves on which my collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century clay pipes was diplayed on. (I've got well over 100 clay pipes, the oldest being circa 1580) It's not that I'm tired of looking at my pipes, it's that I need the shelves that they are displayed on to house books.
As we unpack more "stuff" that had been stored in the garage, I'm finding more and more militaria stuff, books etc.. I've also been accumulating more as time goes by. From my chair I can see no less than 28 historic hats and helmets ranging from WW1 to the Gulf War from 11 countries. Most of them are displayed on styrofoam heads. The oldest are a French Adrian helmet from WW1 and a Camo-painted Doughboy helmet said to have been worn in the Ardenne forest, the newest is an Iraqi National Guard hat. There are flags ranging from a bloodstained "meatball" flag with a prayer wishing for the success of the Japanese soldier who owned it, to the 48-star flag that graced my uncle's casket, to a Kuwaiti flag from Desert Storm. There are representative shels and ammunition ranging from an 1884 dated .45-70 cartridge to a 25mm shell casing from the bushmaster canon of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Iraq.
It's pretty cool to think that all that is left to do to get the museum built is to build the structure as we've already got the artifacts to fill it. I guess cleaning your office can be fun if every pile of "stuff" to sort contains another treasure.
All I know is that Louise will be pretty surprised when she comes in on Tuesday and can actually find my desk! OK, back to work...
posted by MVTCoPete | 6:14 PM
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