Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been disrupted. Very disrupted. Allow him to explain.
Since moving into the Villainschloss, he has had a downstairs room as his “office” or “study.” Your Maximum Leader prefers study himself, but office seems to be more common with Mrs. Villain and the Villainous Offspring. So, his study… The room contained many bookshelves, filled with books (though one shelf of one bookshelf was filled with tchotckes). There was also an old antique leather chair. Next to the chair sat a small side table. The table was big enough to hold a book, cocktail glass, and a candlestick. Then he had his Queen Anne desk in the room as well. He may have shared a photo or two of it on the Twitter at some point in the past.
Well… Your Maximum Leader is past-tensing all of this because he’s been run out of his study beginning today (effectively) and running through the end of June 2020. Why you may ask? Well… For a person… Specifically, a Chinese exchange student who is a classmate (of sorts) with the Wee Villain.
The Wee Villain attends a private school here in Fredericksburg. This school as a good reputation among a circle of wealthy Chinese around Shanghai. So at any given moment there are one or two students from the Shanghai area attending the upper school (aka: the high school). One of these young people is an 18 (soon to be 19) year old senior. He has been living with a family with much younger children (5th grade is the oldest in fact). But that family alerted the school that they could not keep him for his senior year. This caused the school administrators to go into a frantic search to find a family to house and care for this young man for his senior year. The Wee Villain plays two sports with this young Chinese man and they take Spanish together. They get on pretty well and knowing this the school administrators called your Maximum Leader and made the pitch.
Well… We decided to help out and take the young man in. Mrs. Villain was desperately trying to figure out how this was going to work (because at the moment all the Villainous Offspring are at home). It was in this moment of crisis that your Maximum Leader determined to step up an offer up his study to be converted into a bedroom. And so it has been done. It has taken a fair amount of work this weekend to get everything readjusted for the young man’s arrival (tomorrow). Most of the prep work was done by Mrs. Villain, Villainette #2, and the Wee Villain. But today your Maximum Leader has been working all day to get things right. The largest challenge has been related to technology. You see, the primary drop point for internet, phone, and television has been in the closet of the study. This was not going to work out for a number of logistical reasons - chief among them is that your Maximum Leader’s computer (and one or two other tech items) are hard wired only. None of this crazy wi-fi stuff for this. So some equipment and wires needed to be moved through a wall into your Maximum Leader’s “new study for the next year.”
The “new study” is a large unfinished room that has been used for storage. As it has had to be fitted out to house a desk, desk chair, and books. The room, as any good storage room does, has lots of shelving. But the shelving was filled with stuff. Lots of stuff. Before they could house books, the stuff got a sorting. By sorting your Maximum Leader means a purge. As often happens in convenient, roomy, storage rooms things get saved that probably should be discarded. In this case, approximately 2/3 of the stuff on the shelves of the storage room was disposed of, and the remaining 1/3rd was distributed to other areas of the house where it made more sense for the stuff to reside. There was one large casualty of this purge. It was a dresser and side table. They hadn’t been used in a number of years, and were deposited at Goodwill earlier in the process.
The contents (well most of them - one large built-in bookshelf couldn’t be moved and wasn’t emptied - so our exchange student will have at his fingertips a wide array of books on: American History, Western European History (not including the UK or Ireland - which are in another area of the Villainschloss in their own space), Asian History (more Japan and Korea than China), and Political Philosophy) are now in this former storage room. It is from the “new study” that your Maximum Leader types these words to send them into the ether for your reading edification. If there is a benefit to being in this “new study” it is that it is cold. There are no windows. The room is below grade. And there is one HVAC vent that opens fairly close to where your Maximum Leader’s chair is located. So he’s got that going for him.
Wish your Maximum Leader luck for the next year. We hope this all works out… More tales of exchange student adventures will surely come…
Carry on.
