Stop playing with your toys, Dee

In the continuing saga of Useless things On My Desk, today's feature is a wooden frog. Technically, it's a friction drum (you can look that up yourself if you need to. I'm not in a linky mood). It's attached to the stick by fishing line, and if you hold the stick just right while you twist it, the frog will make vaguely froggy noises.

You all need one of these on your desks, you know. Along with the clacker ball behind it, the monitor lizard (of course it's a monitor lizard. It's guarding my monitor), the mini bean bag chair, the manipulative...

Ok, well you probably all need the tape, at least.

Yeah, I have a few toys on my desk. Lots of people use them, so I don't feel badly about the whole thing. Everyone needs something to fidget with, and I'm amused by what people choose as their primary mode of fiddling. It's almost a psychology test, really. Will he pick the therapy putty (not shown in pointless photo) or the magnetic levitating pen (also not shown in pointless photo)?

The interesting thing is that some of these toys seem to have second lives that I don't know about. The little wooden elephant that Wheat brought back from Africa tends to shift around the desk at night. Spooky, right? Ok, so it's probably just the cleaners moving it when they dust, but still. Mobile elephants tend to keep a person guessing. And the lizard? One day -- and I kid you not -- I came in and the lizard was muddy. Muddy. Seriously.

And I doubt it had anything to do with any of the children of staff members borrowing it for a little run through the garden or anything like that.

Anyway. The main reason for yet another desk picture (besides the fact that I really didn't have anything to talk about. Again. Sorry for the drought) is that I found myself playing with the frog while talking to Wheat about something, and that's got to stop. I mean, is there anything more annoying than having someone make random frog noises when you're trying to talk to them? I don't think that there's too much more annoying. And since Wheat was too polite to say anything about it, I'll say it to myself. Or did, in the post title. Stop playing with your toys. There's a time and a place, and if you can't figure it out I swear I'll take them away from you.

So there.

Now if I could only figure out who shuffled my unshuffled deck of cards (also not shown in pointless photo)...





By the way, I know I've probably blogged a version of this before at some point. What can I say? The topic well is reeeally dry in my brain right now.