Meet Me in the Observatory

One of the things I really enjoy about working at the Times is the effect it's had on my productivity. True, the things that I have become productive at are not, in themselves, the most worthwhile activities, yet I can't help but feel that the place, the people, or perhaps their perception of me has had an enormous influence on my ability to follow through with many of my cockamamie ideas. There was a time, not so long ago, when all of my inspired notions would burn brightly for a moment in my mind and then quietly fade away, unrealized. No more.

Case in point:

The first thing you do on any given day at the ol' Horse Factory is head into the laundry room and grab your practice gear. This normally consists of some leggings (chain mail and the like) and a practice shirt you've brought or gleaned from previous stores. Either way, if you've achieved any level of authority around there, you have a cubby in which to store your personal garb.




Here is my good friend Mike getting his costume for the day. Mike is my neighbor. His cubby is directly adjacent to mine. I love Mike like the Jewish love tax season, but lately there has been a bit of a zoning dispute.

You see, the wall that separates our cubbies has become loose, and whenever I go to my little hidey-hole, the rear of the wall has swung into my area, leaving me with substantially less room. If you imagine the wall between ours like a door, the hinge being the visible edge of the board facing outward (many of which are visible in the above photo) the door has swung toward my side of our theoretically joined lockers, and left me with substantially less room.

This happened a few times and, when I pointed this out to a friend of mine, he attempted to fix it by forcing the wall back in the other direction as far as it would go, affording me much more real estate and playing a simple little joke on Mike at the same time. In the process of this small alteration, the board split and a section of the rear of the separating wall snapped off. I now had a door in the back of my cubby leading into Mike's. I joked that I should expand my cubby into his. Do some home improvements, if you please.

That was how it started.

How it ended was this...

Let us go back to Mike approaching his cubby that day. What he sees is this:




Mike's area would be the one with all the shit sticking out of it. Mike's shit, specifically. Apparently, there isn't as much room in there as there once was.




Having removed the overflow of costume from the laden cubby, what Mike is then faced with is this:




Evidently, someone has been doing some renovating and has deemed it necessary to annex a trifle of Mike's property. A smidge. A skosche. Mike, being the curious thing that he is, investigates further.






What he finds is, perhaps, not what he had expected.




Correct. I have installed a guest bedroom off the northern wing of my grounds. Here is a view as you enter the expansion. Keep in mind, non of this is pre-fab, and I have had to do all the construction myself.




Sadly, I have yet to take down that Christmas tree. It's getting to be a real fire hazard.

Still, not bad for a do-it-yourself-er. Maybe a year ago I would have thought, "Yeah, that'd be funny." And then I'd forget about it, or occasionally remember it and think, "Oh, right! I've got to do that!" and never get around to it. I might have even just told Mike about the idea and called that good enough.

Instead I've wasted precious time in this all-too-short life to make a dollhouse wall and stage a miniature coup of my friends clothes-locker. I knew I would eventually find a use for those furniture models, and here it is.

...

I've since relocated the bedroom to my own locker, refusing to let it go just yet and enjoying far too much the soft glow of the light-up Christmas tree through the tiny picture frame window. I pay a Mexican Ridgeback lizard to vacuum in there ever other week, since I rarely use it myself and never have the chance to clean. A while back my friend Thumbelina stayed for the weekend when she was down from the Fairie Kingdom, but other than that it's pretty empty. All this space and nothing to do with any of it. Now I know the plight of those renovating nouveau riche. All that potential space... what to do with it all?

Also, recently, a couple friends and I made this as a Christmas present for our boss:




It's a working lamp. It took us two days to find a lampshade that ugly. His name is Ralphie. We're immensely proud of him.

The fruits of my labor. Time well spent.

---

I'm working on a reloadable silly-string shooting device that can be placed inside a locker and is activated by the door opening. It should be able to empty eight cans of silly string simultaneously in a wide, suppressive array. I'll keep you posted.