What's on your desk?

Life has a way of happening all around me, even without my permission.  Inevitably, mess takes over in some part of the house that I've been less diligent in scrutinizing.  The dining room, for example, is used less than the office.  So it is remarkably easier to see if something is out of place in the dining room than the office.  Since our office is also used as our school room, much of our daily living happens in this small space.  Somehow, in places where I spend more time, I am more blind to the accumulating disaster.  I wish I wasn't that way, but I am.

When I take my "mess blinders" off and try to look objectively at this area, I am actually quite appalled at what I'm living in!  School books and papers, puzzles and games, bills and mail, cameras and computers: they have taken over.  I'm surprised we all fit in the room.  It's really pretty atrocious, though I like to tell myself that it can all be cleaned up rather quickly...once I get those blinders off and actually deal with it.  Sometimes it takes some special circumstances to get those blinders off, something unusual in the midst of the mess, something like this: