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I told you that I’m cleaning out my desk to swap it out with a new one, right? Well, please bear in mind that my current desk has eight drawers, and they’re all unusable. Why? Because they all got gradually turned into junk drawers that I pretty much left alone for… oh, four, five years?

Eight junk drawers over the span of four years can breed some pretty interesting stuff…

1. Cassette tapes. No, seriously! Rebecca St. James and Five Iron Frenzy. I’ve had those since about third grade and I probably wore holes through both of them over the years. I don’t even think I have a tape player in the house anymore. Maybe I’ll go buy the CD’s… for old times sake.
2. Signed postcards from a Jake concert. Well, two of the three anyway. According to Google, I don’t know if these three guys even exist anymore. They probably do, but with a group name as commonplace as “Jake” they’re probably buried somewhere in the internet. They’re kind of cool, though. Maybe I’ll frame them.
3. My script from B’nai Shalom’s production of Star Wars Purim. Remember Darth Haman? Mordecai Skywalker? Jewbacca??
4. My school journal from first grade. Now, I think I found this a couple of years back, thought it was cute, and threw it in there. Looking back, I think it’s pretty darn creative. Most first grade journals say things like “We had brokly for dinerr” or “I lik to coler with craons”… mine’s full of stories about lions, dinosaurs in outer space, and a flying sled. Go figure.
5. An envelope with about nine Israeli stamps on it, another envelope covered in two cent stamps (enough to equal a normal stamp!), and a bunch of letters from Becky that never made it into my letter box. Oh, and I’m tickled that one of the stamps on the Israeli envelope has the name of a Lost episode on it. Can you guess which one?
6. A business card from some obscure Missouri mechanic. We had car trouble when moving here in ‘04, and pulled off the beaten path. Thank goodness we found this guy!
7. A dream journal from 2002. What was I on? Okay, it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s going in the trash.
8. There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom by Louis Sachar. Very much loved, very much dog-eared, and very much written back before he wrote Holes.
9. The third Jake postcard. Hooray!
10. Seven dollars and eighty three cents, two Sacajawea dollars, and a Canadian dollar minted the year I was born.

This is what makes spring cleaning worth it. What’s some odd stuff you’ve found while cleaning?

Good news and bad news! Good news first this time (even though I usually like bad news first). I finally got me a new computer desk. Yeah, kinda nerdy sounding, but for someone who spends such a lot of time at her desk…  mine’s kind of ghetto. Okay, it’s two identical end tables with a big piece of wood across it. Oh, and a big shelf. Face it, though… ghetto.

So I got one of those corner computer desks yesterday. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I have to tear apart this desk and get it out of here before I can even think about getting the new one put together and set up. As a result, I might not be on much for a couple days… if not more. Ah well, my computer needs a break too, right?

I’ll try and be back asap.

You’ve heard of black holes, right? They’re like… okay, blobs of really dense nothing that sucks in everything around it. Black holes have something called the event horizon, which is the point where something getting close to a black hole has no choice but to get sucked in. I guess up until that point, you could turn around and avoid the whole ordeal altogether… but once you pass the event horizon, there’s no turning back.

I’ve discovered that I personally learn new things in much the same way. Let’s say I’m learning a new language… say, Spanish. When I first start learning it, it’s pretty easy. Call it beginner’s luck. I can learn some basic words, form a few sentences, and have a simple conversation.

After that, it gets hard, and that’s the point when I have to really buckle down and study. I have to push myself extra hard to get past that event horizon, when it suddenly falls into place and becomes easy… second nature. (more…)