Brick Walls

Supposedly by late this fall my firm will be moving into its "new" building (actually a historic building that being renovated and rehabilitated after years of bad remodeling). Until then, like many of the offices downtown, my office has a brick exterior wall. I love the look of it. But like many of these old, brick buildings, a lot of the mortar has come out from between the bricks. One day I started sticking things in the spaces (with paperclips). I'd actually like to fill the entire wall with smallish things held up by paperclips in the mortar cracks...but I'm not sure I'll have the time to collect enough appropriately-sized (and interesting enough) things. The three things there now are (left to right): my ACLU Board Member name tag; the piece of Scrabble art I won at the NeoScrabble Spring Fling back in April; and my alphabetically-ordered name tag from also from the Spring Fling.

It's not like you can feel a breeze coming through the bricks or anything. The wall is probably a foot thick. There is one spot where, if the temperature is just right, and you look at just the right spot at just the right angle, you can see a sliver of light...but that's about it.

The one problem we do have that I attribute to the vintage walls...tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tinytinytiny spiders. Orange ones. (And some only slightly larger brownish ones.) I know the orange ones are actually Red Spider Mites but if I said, "I have mites in my office," then people would probably consider that a skin condition or the result of poor grooming. And they look like spiders so... AND you can only see them when they get on your papers or get on your skin so, when you smash one, there is left a very visible, bright orange streak.

But do know what happens when you find and/or kill a tiny spider every day or so in your office? You begin to feel like you always have tiny spiders on you. I find myself closely examining my arms whenever I feel the slightest...maybe...something (which I'm probably usually imagining).

It's okay, though. I don't like the paranoia I've developed about them, but I can deal with the spider mites (and the less commonly-appearing but slightly larger brownish spiders). IF, however, I were to locate even one large spider (or a mouse or something like that) in my office, it's unlikely I'd ever bill another hour of work. It'd be too hard to accomplish anything with my chair smack in the middle of the room, my legs pulled tight to my chest, slowly spinning around on watch for any mouse or big spider that might be planning a sneak attack.