9 thoughts on “I’m at a new desk!”

1. i have, thankfully, been at a desk in front of a window for the past 4 1/2 years. i get to look at trees (orange and red and green and brown right now) and a blue clear sky with a scattering of white streaky clouds.

   of course, i’m also surrounded by photos on my desk of my son, various nieces, my cat, my mom, and my best friend (barbie).

2. Oh Meg, it’s so nice to have you sitting beside me — it’s like a ray of sunshine, with a light-blue ghost in tow.
   Welcome to the North side of the pod!!
   love
   Your new neighbour

3. basement office in historic school, adjacent to boys bathroom. entirely too cluttered, no decor, white walls, very blah, but lots of toys. two small, high-up windows with a view of the sky and a few branches. there’s a squirrel peering through one of them. cup of coffee at my left hand.

4. Three books right off the top of the desk: “The Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle” by Charles Darwin (I’m trying to come up with a parody for my next “Fun With Literature”), “Song Offerings”—poems of Rabindranath Tagore translated by Joe Winter, and “Thoreau on Man & Nature,” a book of Waldenian sniglets that an old girlfriend gave me upon learning there was no prying me out of New Jersey when she had to, for some strange reason, move to Los Angeles (…1979ish). I have a big-ass window, under which are postcard photos of eminent males: Camus, Hitchcock, Giacometti, Mississippi Muddy Watters, Woody Guthrie and Rambling Jack Elliot, Louis Armstrong, Dylan, Ali, Tom Waits, and Ataturk. On my computer screen, blankness that should say a lot by now about the use of guar slurries in enhanced oil recovery applications. It’s probably a good thing that the big-ass window is only two feet over a big-ass roof. So, also in the immediate vicinity of my workspace, there are big-ass boxes that say “Baltimore Air Coil” and the occasional squeegee guy on a rope sling. On the other side of the roof is the twin of the 12-storey “tower” I work in. It’s glass windows provide a constant mirror of clouds (see http://www.foto-ops.blogspot.com for photograph of this cool effect—seven or so entries from the top. C’mon, you know I don’t usually blog-pimp, but this calls for illustration). Piles of newspapers and un-filed notebooks. Lots of sentence fragments. Some guar slurries.

5. Cubical by the window (which claims a blustery, snowy, gray afternoon). Beige desk with calendar, billing junk, random and much needed stationary supplies (does anyone else love the smell of stationary??), and a few medical books.

6. cubicle walls the color of baby poop gold. lots of pictures of me with notsoccer mom and her son, ticket stubs to events that i have been to in the last year, my race number of the triathlon i did in august, the monthly lunch menu and a HUGE can of suave hairspray that i needed for my costume.

7. I had not even realized that some of the bulbs in the light above my desk were out until they replaced them today. It is like sitting directly under the sun around here now! Revealing that my desk is surprisingly dusty.

8. I’m sitting on my sofa, not-watching House, and tuckered out. There’s an iBook on my lap, a coffee cup, four remotes, a stack of printed matter, a backscratcher, and a shaker of Morton Lite salt on the coffee table. Edited hardcopy by my side, and an injured husband upstairs zoning out on muscle relaxants. (He was a main participant in a car crash today; hurray for airbags! He’s okay, just banged up a little.)

9. No light ’round these parts. And when I leave the office, it is dark outside. Deeeeepressing….