2 posts tagged “scavenging”

I finally finished "decorating" my office with an item I salvaged from the the Brain Tumor Hall moving extravaganza.

The English Department decided to part with this gem:

It's one of those serious wall maps that rolls up inside a steel tube that's a good three feet long.  I think it adds a certain something to my office.

I love all the various cat/mirror/light interplay going on in this pic.  (Here's my question--they invented anti-red-eye technology for cameras, but when will they invent anti-yeem technology?  After all, at least 35% of all photos taken in America are of peoples' cats.  Right?)

If you're wondering what sorts of things are on a Literary Map of New England, let me offer you a sample:

There you have it: Salem, MA, birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter.  Oh, and home of "Witchcraft."  Odd.

As I mentioned before, there is a great migration going on in Brain Tumor Hall.  Despite the lamentable disrepair and dangerous air quality in the building, the college administration built on more offices this spring.  So, while two lucky departments are moving into the new space, the rest of us are moving our grad students up from the basement.  In the process, many professors are getting new furniture and parting with decades worth of junk.  Those of us in the "lesser" departments have been vulturing the hallways all week, scouting out treasure. 

The sad/happy fact is that many of the desks, cabinets and chairs being discarded are nicer than what our grad students currently have, so we've been wandering in the forest of discards, tagging things to be moved to our new offices.  In the process, we've found a few treasures for ourselves.

Somebody took home a Cyrillic typewriter of 1940's vintage.  Someone else hauled away an enormous piece of micro-fiche reading equipment.  I scored a pile of old maps.  Look, Flanny is conquering France.   Oh, God, she's stepping on Montpellier!

Hubby came by on his way from work and helped me "recycle" a seven-foot Steelcase bookshelf for our garage (perfect for storing cans of paint and tools), and also picked up this old beauty of a desk chair. 

There are dozens of these indestructible old things sitting in the halls, alongside ten-year old plastic desk chairs that have already gone tits up.  I just don't get the urge to discard everything old for something new.  Sure, sometimes new is nice.  I like new underwear, and I love a new notebook, but I've never had a new desk chair as nice as this one, which was marked "trash."  Sure, it's not that pretty, but it's comfortable and come Armageddon, you could ride a chair like that all the way to the gates of Hell.  *cough*  If you were going there.