OMG teh GDG is teh back

WOW, it's been a long, long time since I've been in here. Probably because I've been trying to come up with something to blog about that isn't related to politics or sexism. O_o (Seriously, I know how I sound when I get on about that kind of stuff. Crazed, for the former, bitter on the latter.)

I have a new desk. Now, I've HAD a desk for years. Little kid's desk, really, office style, painted white, covered in the kind of scratches a kid's desk gets covered in-- I think I've had it at least since I was eight. Of course, I'm way too big for it at the creaking age of twenty-three, and I was never actually comfortable using it even as a bitty child (it's NOT very ergonomic, if you catch my meaning.)

That doesn't mean I don't find it useful, mind you. It makes a very nice shelf/table, and my living space would be even more of a hopeless mess if not for its drawers. I use the chair that came with it to hold one of my lamps (and some Transformers. You can never have too many places to keep Transformers). It'll probably stick around for a nice long while, especially since it goes so very well with my child's Globe Frome Ye Olde Colde War. (Which, incedentally, has deliberately been placed upside-down in its stand. I have a somewhat juvenile sense of humor.)

But it just doesn't work for me as a desk. It's been a long time since I've had someplace I could just sit down and draw, without falling randomly asleep or suddenly discovering that someone didn't wipe the table off properly. (I fall randomly asleep in a lot of places, fyi. Don't try to draw in bed or on a really comfortable couch. You will nap.)

My NEW desk was aquired at Goodwill for the price of one dollar. It's not an office-style desk, nor is it a drawing table, but it is a style of furniture in which I have gotten much work done over the years, and which I can safely say I find both comfortable for drawing at and not comfortable for sleeping in.

My new desk is a school-style combination desk and chair. :3

This may sound strange, but I have coveted these sporklike creations since elementary school. In college, I wrote most of LOP's Man of Power Part Two while sitting in such a chair, waiting for one of my math classes to start (I would go to the classroom as much as two hours in advance, just so I could have quiet time for this purpose.) I got this desk chair, and I did a happy dance (even while I was cleaning the muck off from when it was sitting outside Goodwill. XD)

The only problem was, I had to do some CLEANING before I even began to have a place for it.

My room is an infernal chaos of old papers and jumbled clothing. (Yes, I still live at home. If all goes well, this will change within the next few months.) The only place I could even imagine fitting my new aquisition was on the side of the bed closest to the closet, but the problem with that was...

There was an enormous pile of clothing and a TV dinner tray stand standing there.

Why do I have a TV dinner tray stand? It's this little wobbly thing you might expect to see in a nursing home, except in the nursing homes the part where you set the actual trays isn't rusted halfway through and threatening to stab people with blunt but painful edges. Dad brought it home from heaven knows where and said he was going to throw it out unless someone cleaned it and claimed it for their own.

So of course I had to have it. My original plan was to use it to stack all these leather bags and backpacks accumulating in my room, and maybe to keep my boots on. This had not worked out (as if!) and now there was a very large cardboard box, with about a third of my wardrobe piled inside, balanced atop the long suffering little thing.

Around it, on the floor, lay another sixth of my wardrobe, joined by the boots (who had protested to the TV tray stand mightily) one or two of those wheeled backpacks that had turned out not to fit, and a pile of books.

Next to it, directly in front of the closet, sat a two level shelf with more clothes on it (though not on the lower shelf; there used to be but every time I tried to put something away there would be a very large, pleased calico cat meowing at me from the very spot I had intended to leave my jeans). And behind it, of course, sat my morose and neglected dresser.

The dresser hails from the same set of kid's furniture as the little white desk I'm keeping my globe on. (The set itself is all hand-me-downs from my half-sister, who probably appreciated them more.) It features six very nice drawers, of which I only use one, for socks. (And an Ewok.) It supports several shelves, which were about as organized as the floor but which I use more than the dresser.



I don't really understand dresser drawers. Sure, you fold the clothes, you stuff them in there, but then everything gets messed up again as soon as you want a specific shirt. They also get stuck, especially mine. I can't blame it on my putting too much inside, because they're as hard to open and close when they're empty as they are when I've miraculously tucked fifteen pairs of adult jeans in one child's drawer. They usually smell kind of funny, or at least, they usually smell like confined air. I mean, yuck, like I want all my clothes to smell like musty oak. The only reason I bother using them to keep my socks is because I lose socks like alcoholics lose money.

So I use my drawers to keep Ewoks in, and cardboard boxes for my clothes. I imagine someday I'll have a better system, but today is not that day.

Anyway, I had to get that TV dinner tray stand out of the way, and I had to figure out what do about all those clothes. Eventually, I managed to dig the stand out and put it in a storage room of the house, but those clothes?

Oh look, it's a closet!

Oh dear, it's a DUSTY closet.

I'm very allergic to dust. It's been five days since I undertook this undertask, and I'm still suffering. =p It's like having a cold, except that all you have to blame is your own lack of dusting and your hypersensitive immune system. (But at least I can say with certainty that it ain't Swine Flu germs I just sneezed all over. Still gross, not dangerous.)

I suppose I should also mention that, in order to even start to get some of this stuff out of the way, I had to reorganize the top of my bunkbed (did I forget to mention the bunkbed? Silly me), so that I could reach the upper shelving on the OTHER side of the bed (I'm short, so sue me) and put the books on the floor away. This involved getting the floor where I wanted to put my desk chair even MORE messy (except that this time it was Garfield plushies and bunny rabbits) and completely overhauling the shelves on top of my poor neglected dresser.

You can guess why it took me all day to do this. About halfway to supper, I suddenly remembered that I had never eaten breakfast OR lunch.

OMG!

Sometime that evening, however, I managed to vacuum the affected area (first time I've vacuumed in my room at all for over a year) and finally wrestled my new desk into its new home.

The next day, even though it was Saturday and therefore busy, I sat down for around an hour and zipped easily through an entire inked comic-- even though I kept getting interrupted by a small child and a very large calico cat.

That, my friends, is what I call "worth it."

Signing off-
-Jessi-sama