There is one thing I hate to do more than have my weekly treatment of bamboo up my fingernails- clean house. For some reason there is nothing that my wife can say that will scare me any worse than, "We need to clean house." I believe that if you charted the days that I have been sick over my entire life and cross-checked it with those similar phrases that had the words "clean", "dust", "sweep", or "shovel" (used in the sentence, "You need to shovel a path to your bed so you can get to it."), you would find there is a correlation. This is especially true in my office. As I look around at the hundreds of piles of "important things to do", I realize that they really must not be that important. In my office I also house the world's greatest collection of magazine articles that relate to the Internet. It would take a ladder for me to get to the top of this stack.
When a friend comes to my house for the first time, they immediately know where my office is located. As I give them the grand tour of the house, we come to a room where the door is slightly bulging, as if to say, "Open me". There is an eerie sense that most people have as they come into the presence of this door, not to mention the strange odors of two-week-old pizza. The look of horror is always displayed on the visitor's face. It is as if they had just discovered the "Stephen King Writing Studio". They don't know what's there, but they know they don't want to enter. I've never had one person ask me to open the door, to see my office, or even to say, "What's behind that door?" It is instinctive to them that it is bad and not worth seeing.
I am not only messy in my office, but in all work areas including my desktop. Someone once asked me what kind of wallpaper I have on my computer. I don't know. I can't see it for the 137 shopping icons that cloud my view. I think it's a picture of a candle or a winter scene with ducks. Yet it is these icons that drive my articles. When I come across a site that is a good shopping site or one that you have sent me to include in one of my articles, I put it on the desktop. Then when I am ready to write an article, I begin clicking on icons, until I find one that fits my weekly topic. So, for the sake of making room on my desktop, I am cleaning up my desktop by giving you a list of sites that I never had the time to write about. This hodge-podge will give you a nice variety of shopping sites to checkout, and give me a chance to find out what my wallpaper looks like. Now I'm not going to bore you will all 137 (besides I also have a folder that I have entitled "Deals" on my desktop that has another 186 shortcuts that I haven't gotten around to yet), but we'll get through as many as possible.
