Cleaning my office: ahhhhhh!

At 3:14 on Friday, June 14th, I was cleaning up things in my office.  One of the wonderful things about the academic year is its rhythm: April is always a hurricane, May is always a myth (disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle of leftover tasks), and in June, things quiet down beautifully. I know why people have traditionally done spring cleaning, but for me, the timing seems to always fit better with June cleaning. Things accumulate, and then June rolls around, and then the open spaces in my schedule mean that I can create open spaces in my shelves again, and move other things to where they need to go, including "away".

 

This year, like last year, the cleaning is even more intense because of switching offices. The CSA vegetables that we pick up every week come in wonderful cardboard boxes – reusable, collapsible, durable. Pre-pandemic, we gave them back to the CSA every week, but starting in March 2020 for reasons that are obvious, the boxes were required to make a one-way trip to our house.  Because they're so durable, collapsible, etc., and because of one other special feature, they make excellent moving boxes. 

The "other special feature" is that they are slightly smaller than regular printer boxes, so they fit perfectly (!) in the trash-picked rolling shopping cart that I use to move things around. Isn't life wonderful that way?

At any rate, at 3:14 last week, I was cleaning up my Dean's office and finding lots of happy, empty open spaces.