Gonna have to face it….

Some years ago Southwestern Bell Telephone had a big sale and sold off all their old office furniture. A friend of ours went and bought two honkin’ big oak desks, one for his wife and one for him, for $50 each.

Some years after that they were moving from Dallas to Denver. They’d long since ditched one of the desks, since expanding family eliminated space for two offices. This time they were ditching the other desk, and they gave it to the Resident Storm Chaser.

Who brought it into the house in pieces, because it is too big to fit through a door. We assembled it in one of the bedrooms and I alternated between muttering and wailing, “WHY???” while he muttered and snapped about “Heavy-duty, well-made, good damn piece of furniture.”

As the years passed I found myself alternately tolerating it while dreaming of something more practical, and scheming on how to get it out of my office and house without the Resident Storm Chaser noticing. Because, it just takes up so much room. The desk surface is 60″ wide and 34″ deep. I cleaned it up and polyurethaned the desk surface right away so it would hold up to abuse, but other than that, I’ve moaned about how impractical it is.

Until I finally gave up and fell in love with it.

Which is largely because of the GTD number I’ve been doing on it, so that now it actually holds the stuff I need in an orderly (more or less) manner.

And then I started looking for the card catalog and, um, somehow tripped over and accidentally bought this:

And I don’t even need a clipboard.

And then I went into an estate sale (I never go into estate sales!) and stumbled across and bought this:

Which I really don’t need because it holds 4×6 cards and I don’t even use them. But it was only $2 and I’ve seen them go for up to 5, even 6 times that much on ebay, and there wasn’t even any shipping –

And yesterday my friend told me she uses 4×6 cards for her lesson plans and I told her about it, thinking to myself, “She would love this for Christmas!” except a hoarse voice was whispering in my brain, ” …. not my preciousss…”

And my grip on my latte tightened with a rage to slay the beast who threatened my box.

(Relief is mine! I have a use for it! I can use it to hold POSTCARDS! So it’s no longer an unreasonable desire to possess for possession’s sake … snarrrrrrl)

But now, now look at this. Look at what I have found on ebay, and if there were any chance in hell I could buy this I would not be sharing it here.

Brace yourself for more oak office crack:

But I’m not even dreaming of getting it. I mean, this is getting ridiculous. Because if I went that far, how could I not hunt down old oak bookcases? The ones I have are FINE. Yes, they came from Target, but they are very sturdy and I have six of them in this office alone, and they are all full and I’d have to buy way too many old oak bookcases and who can afford that?

And I don’t even need them.

And will that freaking voice in my head shut the fuck up?!?

“…precious…must have my precious….”

Snarrrrrl.