Jessie and I specifically looked for a 3-bedroom house so that I could have an office and she could have a studio. The idea was not only to have our own personal space in an otherwise shared household, but to keep me focused on my work during working hours and allow me to leave it behind at the end of the workday.
The office turned out to be the middle bedroom, which has purple walls with a stripe of princess-themed wallpaper. I'm planning to cover much of that paper with a wall mural, and a 6-foot span of the opposite wall is newly covered in shelves. I love wall shelves: they hold a massive amount of stuff and you don't have to move them to vacuum under them. But finding 6-foot shelves was a challenge; we had to go to the lumberyard and did not, in the end, get a very good deal, but they are up, and the stuff is off the floor, and that's what's important.
The plan was, we would spend the first week of residency getting Jessie ready to start her job, then make sure I could do mine. That was complicated by the unexpected necessity of spending two days cleaning the basement. In the process of getting Jessie ready, an awful lot of stuff wound up in my office that did not strictly belong there, and the task of digging it back out, on top of everything else, was daunting, so the rocking chair in the living room became my office for a while.
At last, exactly 3 weeks after we moved into the house, I moved into my office. In practice, of course, here I am at 10:00 on a workday posting to my blog. :-) There are still plenty of distractions, both on- and offline, like sorting all of that stuff that's now on the shelves.
For another thing, I'm not used to using my laptop as my primary computer. Most of my files (aside from the ones that are online) are on the desktop computer we're now using for a media center (its original purpose). If I moved them onto my laptop, the disk would fill up, adding to its low memory problems. Plus, it turns out not to be fully compatible with my external monitor (newly liberated from the media center by the purchase of a bigger LCD TV), so a new laptop is now (back) on the wish list. None of that really interferes with getting my work done, except that it distracts me.
Something else distracting? The Missing Box. There is exactly one box that did not arrive. I know some of the things that were in it because I've noticed their absence: a VGA cable, an S-video cable, all the manuals that came with my computers (I had the forethought to copy the CDs), some other miscellaneous computer parts, a bunch of old CD-ROMs I had planned to make into an art project, and my collection of wrapping & shipping supplies (including a brand new package of CD mailers). These were among the last things to be packed, and I remember sticking them into a box ... but I don't remember which one it was or what else was already in it, let alone what the heck happened to it during the move.
Anyway, back to work.
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