Garbage Chair...

About this time last year, I was feverishly editing WEGS Copper which (as all 13 of you who read this blog know...) was going to be released at GenCon 2006. It had been slimmed down to 200 pages by this point.

I pretty much did all my editing in my backyard, sitting in an old stuffed chair that my wife and I had taken out of a neighbor's garbage. One man's trash, another's treasure, right? We thought the chair had character and had the best of intentions to have it refurbished - honestly. Until then, we kept it in the garage. Occasionally, we'd use it for stage dressing for a local theatre we were involved with. The chair was once prominently featured in The Mousetrap, it's ragged arms hidden under some fabric pieces... Ah, stage magic!

Anyhow, I found myself drawn to editing in the AM (before work) and then in the PM (after work). I would pull garbage chair out of the garage, plunk it in the sun somewhere on my driveway, edit for an hour or two, and then squirrel it away in the garage between sessions.

A few weeks into this routine, I had realized that the chair was never really cleaned. We took it right from someone's garbage and threw it into our garage. It was clean enough (if you looked past the brownish discolorations), but there was no denying that it kinda let off a smell when the weather was right...

Since the chair was becoming a part of my daily ritual, I thought it was high time to give the chair a thorough cleaning/beating and got out my wet/dry vac. No ordinary vaccuum would do. I jammed that hose in every possible nook and cranny. The stuff I found below the seat cushion was repulsive - cigarette butts, balls of hair, a spoon, coupons that expired back during the Nixon presidency and around 63 cents.

Someday that chair is gonna be put mounted on a dais in the WEGS museum (located at the back of my garage...).

Or maybe we'll just refinish it as per the original plan...