1 November 2002

The saga of the bill desk is nearly closed! When I came home from work yesterday, there was the second bill desk, waiting on the porch. While I opened the door to diminutive monsters, Matt put it together, and voila! it now stands in our dining room, ready to receive our mail.

The sage is only nearly closed because in yesterday's mail we got a credit card bill on which we were billed for the first desk, which they'd promised us wouldn't happen. Matt called Target, and they told him it would take UPS 7-10 days to get the desk back to them, after which it would take 7-10 days for them to credit our account.

So we're going to wind up paying for the darned thing anyway, and hope the credit comes back in time to help out with the Christmas bills. (The alternative is to not pay it, and accept the credit card's interest charges, which I do not want to do.)

But now we can proceed with the next step, which is to get rid of the desk in the bedroom (well, it's just a card table; we probably won't get rid of it so much as fold it up and stick it in the garage) and replace it with some shelves and one of the computer desks.

This part could be tricky, though, because I want to move the stereo and the CD racks upstairs - we never use them downstairs anyway - which means we need to find shelves deep enough to hold our stereo components, and at least one shelf has to be high enough to allow the top of the CD player to open.

And we'll have to go through all the computer junk and decide what to keep and what to throw out - which will be a hoot, because both Matt and I are pack rats. We might be able to make ourselves throw out some dried up printer cartridges. I might be able to toss some games I bought and then hated. But all those empty boxes, unused cables, and empty CD jewel cases? All the floppy disks with installers for programs we'll never run again? All the old printouts and scraps of paper with cryptic codes scribbled on them? The best I can probably hope for is that we can put all the loose junk inside the empty boxes.

Well, we'll see. We need to clear enough space from the computer room to enable us to move the guest bed in there. Which means making dents not only in the accumulated computer crap, but also in the comics. Oooooo....

We have plenty of time, though. I am, as of this morning, officially Not Pregnant Yet.

On the other hand, if I think we have plenty of time, it may never get done. I am a world-class procrastinator. Especially when it comes to cleaning and reorganizing.

Though I have an additional incentive to get moving on this next bit: Once we get the desk set up in the bedroom, it will (I hope) give me a place to go to escape the television when I'm trying to concentrate.

(Of course, then I'll have to find another excuse for unproductive evenings. Ah, well... One thing at a time.)

--Liz