Desk $95

I had been using Andy’s old desk, which was pretty small and didn’t really utilize the space I had very efficiently. Finding furniture on Craigslist can be tricky. First off, I only search the “By Owner” section. But there are so many hits on almost any search, it’s hard to narrow down, especially when the descriptions are often vague, you could easily miss what you're actually looking for. I can’t set up an ongoing notification for it because I would get dozens of hits a day, which is annoying. It usually ends up being me going through each post. I tried a few more specific searches (“L-shaped desk” and “long desk”), but those weren’t much help. The first because I realized after I looked at the space that an L-shaped desk wouldn’t work at all, and the latter because “long” is just as often used when they’re giving dimensions, whether the desk is arguably long or not.

So it was after the tedium of reading through about 200 posts and calling/emailing with a few people that I found a desk I thought would work. Plus he could deliver it, which is excellent because I have no way to pick up non-collapsible furniture. I offered him $20 extra for the delivery since he was so far from me, which brought the total to $95. I would normally be a little more wary of spending that much money, especially site unseen, but it really seemed like exactly what I was looking for.

Terence delivered the desk while I was at work—Andy was working at home. I could abbreviate Andy’s name on this blog to “A—“ for anonymity’s sake, but you might start thinking it stood for Angel after reading enough of my posts.

Andy said he would try to remember as many things about the transaction as he could for the blog. He said Terence was an older man who used to have a delivery business. He helped get the desk in place, as Andy had already moved all my crap off the old desk and dismantled it.

So when I came home, there was a desk, more perfect than I had hoped, waiting in my nook. It closely matched the flooring and molding around the doors, and it had a ton of surface area and storage. I got to work organizing stuff, and unpacked at least two boxes that had still been packed from the move in July.
I found my terabyte hard drive, which houses my home video project.

Click picture to read more details in this diagram.

Two years ago, I transferred all my family’s tapes to digital format, which of course took up a massive amount of space on my hard drive. I’ve been intending to create a masterpiece with these and with the photographs from the span of the 20th century that I’ve scanned in. So, that hasn’t happened yet. But I did get the hard drive set up and made Andy watch some of the videos.

We laughed and laughed. Not so much at antics of my 5-year-old self, but at how enamored my dad was with the camera. We were on a hike in Arkansas, and there were like, no lie, 5-minute (at least) shots of waterfalls and such. And of course, this is 1980s era VHS quality, so there was no point whatsoever to having this much tape taken up with things Ansel Adams has recorded in much better detail. I can hear myself off camera saying “Daddy, daddy look!” and he says “Yeah, OK” and keeps filming a rock. I wonder what I was showing him? We’ll never know. I love my family, I really do. We’re all so predictably random. I’m trying to find a good clip to upload…it’s between the 25 minutes of table hockey, or my first memory of snow. I think the latter has withstood the test of time a bit better. The test of “was this, or was this not, a retarded thing to videotape?”