> I know of a distinguished professor
> who swept his desktop periodically
> into a big envelope which he then labeled
> "Desktop March 2010" (or whatever date).

When I got into high school my desk top still had a lot of junior high 
and grade school stuff on it; crayon scribblings on newsprint paper, 
plaster of Paris imprint of my hand on a paper plate, reeds and cattails 
from a nature hike, hand-fulls of acorns and buckeyes, an old wooden 
ruler, etc, etc, etc. So, I just laid a 3'x5' sheet of new blotter paper 
over everything to create a fresh clear surface. That worked pretty 
well, so at the end of each year in high school I just covered over the 
accumulation of papers, folders, microscope slides of oak leaf sections, 
half-done drawings of the musculature of the human body, biology 
experiments of unidentifed living matter, the fuzzy white hat my 
girlfriend left behind, etc, etc, etc. The fresh sheet strategy worked 
so well that it continued through four years of art school, with the 
occasional insertion of a sheet of plywood to contribute a little 
stability to the stack. When I finished art school the stack was so high 
that I had to work at my desk standing up. So, I pulled the desk out 
from underneath, added one more sheet of plywood, and tucked four sticks 
under each corner and could sit at my "desk" (really just a "stack") 
again. Well, this continued through the decade of my life and work as a 
preservation carpenter. Eventually I was standing at my "stack" again, 
but this time I just started a new desk-stack right next to the old one. 
On and on, through decades of trades work, contracting, writing articles 
and publishing with the associated accumulations of strata after strata 
of stuff. Now there are five desk-stacks. Recently the director of the 
state preservation commission stopped by for a meeting about a local 
historic building. During our discussion we needed to refer to some of 
my notes and samples from when I was on a project there back in the 
1980s. So, I put on my pith helmet, grabbed a trowel and began a careful 
excavation into stack No. 4. Following the law of super-position and 
principle of layered succession, it only took a few minutes to get down 
to the strata that revealed the needed notes and samples.

John (now realizing the law of ordered chaos) Leeke
www.HistoricHomeWorks.com

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