From the Desk of...

I have a desk now. We've had a room designated as the den/guest room since we moved in, but it was deskless until this weekend. I did have a computer desk before, but it became inadvertently and irreparably disassembled in transit (the movers warned me it might break, and I told them to go ahead and move it anyway. It made it halfway). So Friday night I bought a desk, and Saturday afternoon the kids and I built it.

It feels nice to have a desk again. We had the computer set up before this, using a folding table and a file cabinet, but it's just not the same. Now I have an actual piece of real estate, a place I can call my own, even if I have to share. Next comes the daunting task of determining what of my junk will actually take up residence on the desk.

And I have a lot of junk, I've come to realize. I've got about five moving boxes in here that I've gone through cursorily, and about 2/3 of it I can't begin to imagine what I'll do with it. It'll probably all end up consolidated into one box and stuffed up in the garage rafters. Or thrown out.

I also made some progress on getting the garage organized yesterday, too. Organizing the garage is not easy when you really have no idea where things are supposed to go yet. My storage scheme has not yet taken form, so I'm trying to find places for everything while remaining non-committal about the final locations of things. Eventually I'll start to see the pattern, but for now, it's just a big mess that keeps shifting about.

Also this weekend we found out that there are worse things than my dad needing to go in for major heart surgery. It seems he's also got serious liver problems, and so both conditions are inoperable. There are a few medical options left, but for the most part it's now more a question of how long he's got. No one's been able to give us a good answer yet.

I've known for some time, at least on an academic level, that my parents aren't going to live forever. I guess I'm not really ready to accept it internally. As "mean, ornery, and cantankerous" as he may be, I love my dad, and I want to keep him around awhile longer. Perhaps it's selfish, but nonetheless true.