Betty and Veronica

(Updated: For those wondering, I've edited this page by request for privacy reasons. Back to normal Blatherings tomorrow. :-)

When we were grocery shopping on the way to the cottage, I noticed this revamped Betty and Veronica comic on the magazine rack near the cash register:



Am I the only one who thinks this just looks WRONG? Betty and Veronica are SUPPOSED to be two-dimensional and cartoony-looking! Gack. It's almost enough to make me want to eat refined shellac:





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my office cave

I took the photo of my office yesterday (the view from my desk) to post in a comment for Lisa Yee's blog where she wrote about writing spaces. I can SO identify with what she said:

A few people commented on my office, when they saw my last blog. Well, here's the lowdown on writers' writing spaces. Writers do best in spare spaces. Not having clutter around frees the mind, liberates the spirit, and energizes the creativity. Only, this doesn't work for me. I NEED to be surrounded by STUFF. Everywhere STUFF. I must tell you, though, I know EXACTLY where everything is. Except for the things that are lost.

Jeff is opposite of me when it comes to clutter, as is his mom. When his mother last visited, she walked into my office and said, "Oh Debbie, I had no idea you were like this!" Ginny, by the way, owned a gorgeous white condo that looked as if it came straight out of an interior design magazine. I was terrified of eating or drinking anything red in it! Hence the inspiration for this strip. :-)

Anyway, this is what my office space looked like before we moved in:



See the photo at the TOP of the page to see what it looks like now. To Beckett's clan: The reason you never see the wonderful quillow you made for me in my office pictures is because Jeff likes it so much AND it matches the rest of the house, so we keep it upstairs in our living room. I use it on a daily basis, and I love the little pocket where I can stick my feet to keep them warm. :-)

Here's what the other half of my office looked like, when the previous owner lived here:



The left corner you see in the photo turned into my office desk corner. We insulated the walls and ceiling, added insulating flooring and carpet, drywall. Here's what my office desk corner looked like, shortly after we set up funiture:



Here's what it looks like now:



If you click on the image above through to Flickr, you can see the associated notes with various objects.

The rest of the house is nothing like my basement office. Jeff agreed not to touch anything in my office (his tendency is to tidy up clutter wherever he sees it :-)) without my permission. My bookshelves are already overflowing; eventually I'm hoping to be able to put some of my books on other shelves in the house, but we need to figure out an organized system first. My tendency would be to stick anywhere there's space, which isn't the optimal solution, I admit.

For the first couple of months, I did try to raise the blinds in my basement office to let in a bit of natural light...but then I gave up on pretending I was interested in what was going on outside. When I'm working, the rest of the world fades away. So now I use my window alcoves as more shelf space. :-)




I love my home office: it's my cave, my sanctuary, my den of creativity. It's much more ME than the rest of the house, though I do love our house. In my Office Cave, however, I'm surrounded by mismatched colours and books and fabrics and stationery and craft supplies and music and, well, STUFF. And there's a tree in the corner with a reading chair below.

It's about as close to my Dream Office as I could ever get in this lifetime.

:-)

So what about the rest of you?

What's YOUR office like? And what would your dream office be?

Links O' The Day

Winterbells: soooo cute! Probably too cute for some of you, but I'm a big fan of the Orisinal games because of their cute artwork and mellow music. Looks kid-friendly, for you parents out there.

Curveball: Geez, I feel old. I still remember the days of Pong...

Yearly Squirrel Report: Thanks to my friend John Chew for the link. This is a genuine report in Lincoln, Nebraska, which has been nicknamed "the squirrel report" by city officials: an administrative report on how many outages the city-owned Lincoln Electric System has experienced in the past year and what caused them.

How To Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else): I'm still amazed and somewhat horrified by what some people blog about. Despite the list of tips given in this helpful article, I still say that the best strategy is NOT to blog about anything you wouldn't be willing to have published in a national magazine or newspaper.





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