Six will get you five

From The Clog Almanac:

Besides the actual desk itself, there are five pieces of wooden furniture in this room, a room small enough to enclose them all within a twelve-foot diameter. Clockwise from north-by-northeast:

1) The box itself sits upon a small end table, not quite two feet off the ground. There is a lower shelf, which contains a power strip and whatever happens to get thrown there.

2) The remains of a video rack — the swinging doors disappeared years ago — support my scanner (which is legal-size, so it needs a lot of support), my answering machine (which is downright tiny), various tools, and a twenty-year-old cassette deck, should I decide to dub a tape to CD.

3) A small drop-down desk (there was a matching chair, but the operative word is "was") contains everything pertinent to paying the bills, which, given the number of bills I have, is quite a lot.

4) A bookshelf reaches nearly to the ceiling, and is almost completely full.

5) An old chest of drawers, painted white, holds up my small shelf system and a Cambridge SoundWorks Model 88 radio (one of two I own). In years past, this chest held about four hundred tapes, but at the moment, only one drawer is full; it contains about ten years' worth of photographs and the attendant ephemera.

What all these have in common, besides the fact that they circle my chair, is the fact that I got none of them new. The end table and the video rack were garage-sale purchases; the desklet once belonged to my ex, but was passed to me with the rest of the second-best furniture at breakup; the chest was salvaged from the woodchipper, or some similar fate; and the bookcase was presented to me by a friend who now has built-in book storage — which she should max out any day now, if she hasn't yet.

Not exciting, perhaps, but this is not a room wherein a great deal of excitement takes place, as those who saw my dubious television appearance may recall.