This Week's Sneak Peek

So, did anyone hear Saturday's post title tune in their heads? 

Things have been slightly chaotic at the home front this week: it was time to get some repainting done inside the house, and my better half decided that the guest bedroom at the front of the house and the office in the back of the house ought to switch places. As we originally had them, any guest would be awakened early in the morning by the sunrise through the picture window — very early from mid-spring to mid-autumn.

We started by emptying the bedroom; as of this writing, much of the bedroom furniture is still in the living room, dining room, and basement. My husband finished painting that bedroom in time for my computer and scanner to be set up in the new office so I could send this week's cartoon in on time.

I'm extremely disappointed that my beautiful, sturdy rolltop desk can't fit in the new office. It would block either the picture window or a pair of light switches, and it's not built to house a computer tower, scanner, or any monitor bigger than a modest laptop.

At least it's not a family heirloom (it includes an interior light fixture and a phone jack). I bought it almost 30 years ago at a charity auction to replace a much more cheaply made one I'd had since I moved out of my parents' house. 

After all these years, I had its seven drawers, four cubby holes (and a secret compartment) crammed with stuff: a staple remover, my good scissors, spools of thread, paper clips, photo corners, stamps, return address labels, greeting cards, a 15" ruler, a slide rule, a set of Dietzgen drawing instruments from the 1930's, pay stubs, tax forms, banking records including those Mom left behind, her obituary and funeral arrangements, Grandpa Berge's jade pen standard from the Wisconsin Alumni Association in 1937...

While my husband painted the front room, I spent over a day shredding old papers. Nearly everything else has ended up in cardboard boxes in the basement ... among all the other cardboard boxes in the basement that I'll have to rummage through in order to find where the damned staple remover is.