Tag: home office

To Do List

It’s Saturday. Jen is going to be working today so I will be fending for myself. I’m going to Vermont tomorrow to take my step son to a UMass Lowell vs Vermont NCAA Hockey game so I have to get all of the stuff I need to do this weekend done today.

It’s time for a to do list, babie! Yes!

  • Do my 40 minutes of exercise and eat breakfast. Gotta start the day off on the right foot.
  • Our bathroom tub is a disaster of mildew and soap scum and a partially clogged drain. Clean it!
  • Put together a desk for the new home office work space.
  • Go to BestBuy and curbside pickup two orders of stuff for the new home office work space.
  • Go grocery shopping.
  • Clean the cats’ litter boxes.
  • PLAY YOUR FRIGGIN’ GUITAR!
  • CALL YOUR FATHER!

There. That’s a good list of things that need to be accomplished today. Let’s see how many we can get to before bed time tonight.

Weekend Project

I mentioned in a post a few days ago (so… like… 100 posts back… I post waaaaaaay to much) that I am going to set up a new office space in one of the kids’ rooms. I am going to put together a new desk and a work-from-home workstation to use with my work-issued laptop. I was also thinking of putting a personal machine in there just for schnitzengiggles. I figured it would be a windows box and I could put some games on it or something. Mostly it would just be used for youtube, but who knows.

Today I had a crazy idea.

If I am going to have a desktop machine that isn’t a Mac (I am 100% a Mac user outside of work)… why not a duel boot with a version of Linux? Debian or Ubuntu? Something like that?

That could be fun, right? Get a little swagger for my Computer Science degree going? Yeah… we’ll have to look into that more once everything is setup and running.

Home Office

Back story: When the pandemic first hit and we all started to work from home, Jen and I both had a desk in the same home office. Quickly we realized that we were in each other’s way and I moved my desk to our bedroom. We stayed like that until I had a minor covid scare in September of 2021. At that point I moved into my step son’s bedroom to quarantine. I slept and worked there for a few weeks and then moved back to the bedroom.

In the spring of 2022 we had our cellar redone and in April I moved my desk downstairs. I’m still there. Over the course of this working from home journey, both of my step kids have moved into apartments in Burlington, VT. I promised them that they would always have a place in our house if they needed it, and that includes a place to sleep when they come to visit. Due to that, their bedrooms will remain their bedrooms forever.

When my step daughter moved out she left most of her furniture here. When my step son moved out he took all of his furniture with him. Jen and I have been trying to figure out a way to re-furnish his room. So far we’ve only put a day bed in there. He used it when he was home for a visit last week. That worked out well. What else can we do though?

The next move is going to be adding a computer desk to his room. In fact, I think I am going to move my work from home office in there. My plan is to work from the desk in his room when he’s not here, and work at my current desk in the cellar when he is. That means I am literally going to have two home office spaces. I will keep my music nook setup in the cellar as well. I make all of my guitar noise there as well as doing all of my morning exercise. That’s too much ruckus for upstairs next to Jen’s workspace, so that clearly stays downstairs. Everything for my work space though is going to be duplicated upstairs.

We found a desk online that looks like it will be perfect. We have a couple of monitors we’re not using that will be perfect. Jen has a keyboard and a laptop stand I can use. We ordered a wireless mouse and a webcam and a USB hub today. It’s going to take a week or two to put all of this together so I will keep working from the cellar for now, and then right about the time it will all be setup my step son will be on Christmas break so he’ll be coming home for part of it. While he’s home he can use the desk too. I might even look to put a cheap desktop machine there for him to use and for me to use for any non-work stuff that might come up while I’m in there. That seems like a decent plan.

Now we just have to make it all happen.

More Desk Fun

I shared a bunch of pictures on Tuesday of the changes I made to my basement office. Mostly I was focusing on splitting my work computer off into it’s own space. Doing that freed up a ton of space on my home computer desk but I didn’t really do much with it.

Until now!

Jen bought new speakers for her computer upstairs and I inherited an old set. I put them on the desk on Tuesday, but I didn’t have an amplifier that would work with them. Off to amazon.com we went and I was able to set it up this morning and test it out.

The new desk audio setup is sah-weeeet.

New speakers:

New digital audio converter:

Can you guess what the first test subject was? I bet you can. Sure you can.

Lunch Break Project

I set up my desk in the cellar before my surgery last year, at some point in April 2022. I had been thinking about changing things up for a month or so and today, without really planning to, I did something about it.

I now have a work computer desk and a personal computer desk. Sure this is a cable spaghetti mess, but I threw it all together during my lunch break today so it’s as good as you can expect on short notice. The monitors are my wife’s. Actually, the keyboard and the mouse are hers too. The webcam is too. Also the stand the laptop is sitting on. So… I guess it’s sort of my wife’s desk and I’m just using it. Oh yeah, the desk was hers too. So… yeah.

Another Long Day

Another long day filled with a gaggle of long, frustrating meetings and problems. 18 minutes until the weekend. I think we’re in a position right now where we will be able to call it a day at quittin’ time, but I’m not going to count my chickens until they hatch.

What’s in the queue for the weekend? Not sunrise at the ocean pictures because the weather forecast is crappy. Tonight we’ll have our third Hello Fresh meal. The first two were excellent and I expect good things from the turkey meal we have lined up for tonight.

I have to mix a song. It’s the last day of the month so I need to finish off the second of two songs I worked on this month before midnight so that I can complete my personal write and record a single challenge. The first song was done a couple of nights ago. The second song isn’t as good, and the performance is worse, but it’s still worth finishing. Tomorrow is April 1st so the Record Every Month challenge resets and I can start working on something new. I’m thinking about using the tremolo built into my amplifier this time. I never use it… so maybe I should.

Jen has a project in her office that we’re going to work on. She wants to change a bunch of things on her desk. We haven’t done that in a while so it will be fun to mix it up. I am thinking of changing things up on my desk too, but I think I want to wait a month until the window replacement project is complete. I don’t know why but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

My exercise and calorie (move) goals are done for today. My liquid intake goal is also done. I have a few more hours before my stand goal is done, and almost half of my protein goal is still outstanding. I’m behind on that one, by quite a bit. I’ll hit it though.

Okay, time to sign off. I still have nine minutes left in the work week. The weekend is so close… so very, very close. I’m ready for it.

What’s Next for the Cellar

I am on a late lunch break right now, posting a late lunch break bloggie post. So what, you ask? Well I’m doing it from the cellar, the new location of my home office.

This morning before work I brought my desk and filing cabinet along with both computers (one for work, one for not-work), my gigantic monitor, all of the hardware I use for work (camera, headset mic), and a few other things. Most of it is setup now. I have a podcast playing on my MacBook, airplaying through an old HomePod, and a few lamps with internet connected light bulbs. It’s nice and bright down here and everything is working fine.

There is just one hang up, and it’s one we saw coming a mile away. It’s a little cold down here. Not too bad, but a little chilly. I have a light jacket on. I’m fine and dandy. We have a little space heater upstairs that isn’t being used. I’ll probably bring it down here at some point.

So what’s next for the cellar? Tonight we’re going to mount the new TV in the little living room space. There are a few more things to bring down from upstairs, like the exercise bike and the guitar nook. We have some pictures to hang and some signs and things like that. There’s a shelf we want to put on one wall, and a curtain we want to hang in the one little cellar window. We have a bookcase coming and another little cubbyhole looking storage thingie.

After all of that? Just sit back and relax and watch a movie and have my internal organs hacked up and stapled back together. Yeah, that.