Where I live

Lately work has been driving my life. I generally don’t like that. I don’t like it even now but brief forays into workaholic mode are sometimes required. This round is particularly bad timing though. Last weekend Rob and I drove to Louisiana to pick up my nephew to come spend some of the summer with the wife and me. This week is his first week staying at our house for any length of time by himself and most of what he sees of me is the bottoms of my feet… I’ll explain.

I work from home and I work a lot. Between 12 and 20 hours a day most days. Never less than 12 hours on a week day. Since I work from home I have a bit of latitude in how my office is arranged. My “office” is what was originally a “sitting room”. It has a gas fireplace in one corner and the doorway opens into the hallway near the living room. As you enter the room, immediately to the left is a bookshelf. The book shelf contains all manner of geek stuff from books to toys to cables to 10 year old pieces of hardware that will never work again but… might be useful… someday. Directly in front of the door way is my desk which faces it. Behind the desk is a pair of large windows that look out into the North Carolina forest not twenty feet away. To the right of the doorway is a folding couch which only gets used at naptime when friends are visiting with kids but which also works nicely for a catch all. Between the desk and the couch is the gas fireplace which takes up most of that corner. Like the couch, it never gets used but it has a nice mantle which holds my nicer geek toys. It’s not a big room but everything mostly fits.

The desk in my office is a six foot folding table. On the “desk” are three 21″ high resolution flat screen monitors arranged side by side. As I face the monitors the one on the right is my home computer. It always has a web browser running in it so that I can look up things that the office wouldn’t normally allow. The monitor on the left is dedicated to my work laptop. It’s always connnected to work and I’m always keeping an eye on it. The monitor in the center can switch between either the home computer or the work computer so that whichever one I’m working on at the time is spread across two screens. In total there’s about four feet of monitors. To the left of the monitors sits my laptop with its screen open… something else to watch. I can’t see over the monitors so when I’m behind my desk I can’t see anything in the other room or anything in the room I’m in. I’m hidden back here all day, every day. My only escape is to turn around and look out the window… it’s quite an escape. Of course, I can always find time for a quick break to wander around outside for a bit. But mostly, I’m here behind my wall of light. My phone is to my right on a plastic storage box. I have a speaker phone as well as a portable phone with a headset. I can, on occasion, join a conference call, put the headset on and wander out to the hammock in the yard for an hour to listen in. Those chances are rare but nice.

Behind the “desk” is my chair. I love my chair. It is a full size, I kid you not, Lay-Z-Boy recliner. Big sucker too. I had to set the table up on bricks to get it high enough. Talk about being Redneck? Not only are my cars on blocks, my computers are too! Both my keyboard and mouse are wireless so there are no cords to get in the way. The keyboard goes in my lap and the mouse works fine on the big arm of the chair. The chair swivels and is close enough to the desk that the arms are nearly under the table. I sit down, swivel to face the monitors and hit the recliner lever. Up go my feet, and I push the back about halfway into full recline. If I get tired I can lean back and rest for a bit.

Regardless… anyone walking past my office will see a wall of monitors and my feet sticking out from under the other side of the desk. Not a terribly exciting sight for someone that rode 950 miles to see you.