Home Office

It’s been quite some time since I arranged myself a corner of the flat into a office space, one that was suitable for both work and study.  I deemed it necessary because a) it makes a percentage of my home expenses tax deductible and b) because when I’m working on stuff it really is a lot easier to get into the right head-space if I’m actually ‘at work’ even if it is only 3 steps from the sofa.  It’s a bit of a weird psychological thing but I find myself a lot less easily distracted when I’m looking the to do list on the white board and am working with a keyboard and mouse than when I’m sitting on the sofa with a cat and the laptop on my lap and am also easily distracted onto sites like facebook… It also makes a difference when I actually get dressed for ‘work’ rather than hanging about in my pajamas… (oh, wait… I don’t… er… this is awkward.)

So, there it is above, my little office!!!  No, it doesn’t really have natural light, but in reality, neither does the flat as a whole, which is a bonus in this heatwave.  The flat’s always about 10degC cooler than the outdoors.  The table is actually my dining table around which there used to be 4 chairs… Now I have to dismantle the office when I want to have anyone over to dinner… bummer that, in fact, most of the time we end up eating off our plates on our knees…  (Ed. God, this is boring… haven’t you got anything else?) so now you know how to picture me when I’m blogging, as I’m now (Ed. except for the pajamas part, you don’t want them picturing that… Me. True enough… er, as you were everyone.)

I twittered during the week about having 2 Macs on the go and whether or not I was in heaven or the other place.  I think, after a whole lot of toing and froing to my serviceman (whom I <3 with all my Mac loving little heart) I can finally say I’m a happy Mac camper again… it was touch and go for a while there…  The new love pictured above is an older version of the old love which was given to me by ‘real job’ in lieu of certain other entitlements I had been pinning a bit of hope on.  I accepted it, probably slightly less than graciously because the offer was made after I’d spent half an hour talking over the merits of a brand spanking new MacBook Pro with my sales agent and getting all excited about the prospect of this fancy new machine.  So to take on the older one, while clearly saving me going into debt or onto a lease for a new machine was a bit of a downgrade…

In a rather ironic turn of events the new mac (which is an older mac) had been in possession of another staff member who’d just upgraded and actually, its hard-drive DIED the day before she went overseas… so I have been holding onto my old mac (which is a newer mac) until such a time as I could transistion to the other machine.  Well that was the heaven/hell episode last week, I got the new one and it gave me all manner of grief as I tried to get it into some kind of functional order… bah humbug.

Finally, I took it back to my lovely service man and bless his little cotton socks if he didn’t actually replace both sticks of RAM in the machine for no cost… zero. <3 <3 <3.  So finally I bought it home and was able to get it into a place where it is barely any different than the old machine (which is newer… you get the idea now, right?!).  So, I’m finally feeling the blessing of the machine.  It still looks good, it works fine with one lingering exception I’m waiting for an answer on from my fabulous service man as to why it’s such a noisy beastie and when that is resolved I shall be in fine shape to get my game on for the epic that shall be called ‘study09’. 

So, I am blessed. I was given a MacBook Pro and my leaving gift from the office will be some rather expensive software that I’ll be needing this year and when all of that is in order the ‘real job’ era will be completely over.  I cannot tell you, even after the shaky end to it all, how fabulous it feels to be in a whole new chapter of my story! 

So, here’s to a new year! Hopefully one that will include more blogging, even if it is tedious drivel like the above…