A Desk is a Lonely Place

Spring is upon us, and the spirit has moved me to do a major purge in my office at work. There's stuff I've been hanging onto forever because it might be useful. Trade magazines, carefully saved scraps of paper with notes on them that I no longer understand but might need some day, stale sugar-free lemon drops, and company newsletters dating back to 1999 spent an afternoon commingling in my trash can before disappearing to where ever my trash goes when it no longer resides in my office. Things that I don't want to think about were removed from sample fridge and disposed of surreptitiously. Files were made, and other files were purged. It was a weeklong orgy of destruction and quat disinfectant diluted with alcohol.
That's alcohol in the quat, NOT in me.

My office is still far from sterile. My Gumbies and Dr. Potatohead are still displayed. My specimen skulls are still lined up on the credenza behind my desk. And my coffee pot ain't going nowhere. I'd just be willing to actually drink coffee made in it now. But somehow, the desk seems emptier, a little less interesting without its piles of paper and carefully orchestrated mayhem. So I decided to do something about it.

Yesterday I added eggs to water, and today I am the proud mother of an as-yet undetermined number of sea monkeys. The kit my sister had given me at Christmas had been sitting around in the master bathroom at home for months, waiting for me to pass judgment on it. The cats were far too interested in the Triops Project, and I didn't want to have to fight them off the sea monkeys. Then it occurred to me that I could spruce up the office by growing a tankful of friends.

The dang things are too tiny to really see yet. There are four little magnifier bubbles built into the side of the half-pint tank, but I'm thinking they'd have done better to build in an electron microscope for me to monitor the progress of my crustaceans. Either that, or they were all stillborn. They're supposed to be big enough to feed on Monday, so I won't despair yet.

Heck, it'll give me a rare reason to want to come into work on Monday.