Today I showed my friend Els some photos of my office. Since I made the photos while we were chatting via Live Messenger, she got an actual impression of my workplace.
The first photo shows the two extra shelves I made in my office. I probably could have created even more storage space by removing the four massive pieces of wood - of which only two are visible in the above photo - which I use as shelves as well, but since we're renting this place I don't want to burden myself with too much work in the future; putting things back into place when we move to a different place.
Each of the boxes you can see in the above photo contains a scorpion. The two next to the stack of books, and the left most two below the books contain scorpions from either El Limon Totalco (Veracruz) or Laguna de Alchichica (Puebla). The other boxes contain scorpions we have found in or on top of our house (Centruroides flavopictus), or Florida bark scorpions (Centruroides gracilis) we have found in the state of Veracruz (two specimen) and the state of Chiapas (one specimen, not 100% sure if it's C. gracilis though).
The above photo is a crop of the previous photo, and shows better what's on the top shelve I added: A DVD box containing Xara Xtreme, 5 Pixies DVDs, Robots - a movie I like a lot, a few music CDs - including System of a Down's self titled album and Mezmerize, a few data CDs, and five computer related books. Of those the two Java books were sent to me in exchange for reviewing an outline for a book on Mozilla Firefox.
This photo shows the computer desk I had custom made. On it you can see two small terrariums, the left one housing a small Mexican blind snake, the right one housing a small scorpion I captured near the town of Tenextepec, the 7th of the previous month.
Next to the monitor - a Compaq 7550 - you can see my Dell Axim X51v PDA being charged in its cradle. The computer is an upgraded Compaq Pressario SR1505LA. I added extra memory, a better video card. I also replaced the CD-ReWritable with a BenQ DW1650 16x DVD ReWriter.
On top of the computer you can see a pink bear, and the red blob is Elmo of Sesame street fame. The latter I bought as a souvenir in the central bus station of Puebla (CAPU) before we returned to Xalapa, yesterday. On the shelve above the computer rests my laser printer, a HP LaserJet 1010, with to the left more scorpion enclosures.
In the above photo you can see the back of my office, or: what's behind me when I am working at the computer. The large terrarium with the glass divider houses a tarantula in each section. Both specimen are as far as I know Costa Rican Tiger-Rump tarantula spiders (Cyclosternum fasciatum). Both tarantula spiders were found in the state of Veracruz. The terrarium underneath the tarantula enclosure houses a vinegaroon (Uropygid species). The other terrariums and boxes mostly contain scorpion specimen.
The boxes at the bottom are used to stored a wide range of things: paper, cables, plastic cups for keeping baby scorpions, Christmas decorations, a vacuum cleaner, etc.
In the top left corner of the photo you can see the SpongeBob SquarePants game of life Esme and I bought some time ago. When I mentioned this to Els on Live Messenger, she replied to me she was getting more and more an Internet "disorder", because she wanted to click on parts of the photo I had just sent to her to get a better view.
She wrote that for example she wanted to click on the box with Life written on it to see if to the right it had SpongeBob written on it. I told her no, since we bought the game in Mexico, so it says "Bob Esponja".