I'd Like to Thank My Father for Teaching Me to Use A Screwdriver

When I left work last night, the view of campus looked like this:

Magical, huh? It sure was gorgeous, but it was also very, very wet. It was so warm that when you stepped in it, it melted under your feet. Good thing I shoveled the sidewalks, because last night the temperature dropped almost 40 degrees and all that slush turned into ice. My walk to the office this morning almost killed me (okay, I exaggerate -- it almost dropped me on my tush) at least four times from the hazardously icy sidewalks. On the upside, though, there was this:

Since the semester is now officially over, the office is, how shall I say this, extremely slow. At least one person came in yesterday, and I did get a few calls. However, today: zilch. Good thing I Had A Plan.

This is what my office looked like my first day of work back in August.

This is what my office looked like at noon after I spent the morning rearranging it.

Okay, it wasn't that big of a rearrangement, mostly I just switched the orientation of my desk. You can't see it in either of the above photos, but my office houses the office's library on a couple of bookshelves just out of the picture on the left. That means people are popping in and out of my office looking for things. In the previous orientation, that meant getting out of or back into my desk space was really annoying if people were perusing our collection, and since people do that pretty often, the situation was less than desirable. So with all the lovely time I have on my hands while the semester is out, I hatched A Plan to fix that.

I have to say, I'm pretty darn proud of myself. That desk is huge and while it's not massively heavy, it is unwieldy. The two parts are actually screwed together, a fact I found out after clearing it off and trying to move it. Unscrewing it was easy, and once the two parts were separated it was pretty easy to get them moved to where I wanted them. The hard part was getting them screwed back together. You have to hold the smaller piece in place to make everything line up correctly, and obviously I can't hold it in place and screw it together at the same time. (Believe me, I did try. I tried to hold it up with my legs and  screw it in (with my hands, obviously), but it was a no go.) No one else was in the office, and I couldn't just go pop into the Controller's office across the hall and ask some startled accountant if they'd like to come hold my desk in place while I screw it together.

The solution I came up with is, I think, certifiably genius. Or at least worthy of being dubbed "MacGyvered".

Yup. That's a camera tripod. Genius, right? Sometimes I just really love myself.

Well, that did the trick, and I had the two pieces back together. Then I spent about a half-hour wrangling the appalling tangle of cords sprouting out of the back of my computer into a manageable tangle...

...and put everything back together. I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with myself for getting it all right on the first try. I didn't even have to hunt for the reason why my second monitor wasn't working or (fake) swear at my printer for doing wonky things. Nope, it all turned back on perfectly.

Here's the view from the back corner of my office, looking out the door into the hallway leading to the rest of the office. You can see the bookshelves I mentioned above behind the lamp. And that's a picture of one of the bridges over the Han River in Seoul on my computer desktop.

All in all, it was a pretty good day. I feel accomplished.