The home office

Three reasons for this post:

1. Finally got pictures hung on the wall behind the computers
   
2. The room is about as picked up and clean as it ever gets
   
3. Might soon be my only office.
   

After a very long time sitting in the closet I finally just hung up the pictures for this wall. Mostly from my travels in 2007.

• Top left is a piece of aboriginal art from Australia purchased on my first trip to Sydney
  
• Top middle is a shot of the Eiffel Tower purchased in a little shop in Monte Martre on my second trip to Paris.
  
• Top right is a triptych of iconic Sydney sights purchased at a street market on my second trip to Sydney
  
• Bottom left is a panorama of the Seattle skyline purchased at a shop in Pike's Market on our Vancouver/Victoria/Seattle vacation trip.
  
• Bottom middle is a photo of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall of China. Not the section I visited, that was Mutianyu. Purchased from the photographer at a flea market in Beijing.
  
• Bottom right is a Paris skyline with one of the Notre Dame gargoyles in the foreground. Purchased at the same time as the other Paris picture.
  

The room is in decent shape for a change. I tend to pile stuff on the footstool, a bad habit I'm trying to break. My shiny big 26-inch wide screen monitor is paired with the older 19-inch wide screen in a dual-monitor setup. That's where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day. I've taken to using RDP to the laptop so I don't have to change between the two keyboards. The solo monitor to the left is for our home computer, Alice's laptop, which happened to be gone when I shot this.

And finally, the office situation. My employer is going to compress more people into cubicles to save on office rent. Our Houston space has shrunk from occupying our own campus of four buildings to selling the campus and compressing into 3 then 2 and soon to be 1 building. For the moment there are still more employees than can fit even in cubicles. So the solution is to convert some people to office-at-home with a few cubes fitted for "hoteling" (i.e., empty with a phone and network port). Since I work about 9 days out of 10 at home anyway, I've volunteered. The main upshot for me is I'd lose my office phone. I tap into that via some magic software that causes my office extension to ring my work Blackberry and, more importantly, lets me make calls that originate at the office. We'll see how this proceeds.

Another project done: Laundry room tile

(Catching up on past events, however unexciting)

Before and after pics of the laundry room floor. It is so much better. Cruddy, worn vinyl and beat-up rusty drain pan all gone. And all the squeaks removed in the process.

As the long break I had at Christmas wore on, Alice reminded me: "If you let this vacation slide by you'll never have time to do the tile and you'll have to hire someone." When she's right, she's right.

This occupied all my free time from New Year's Eve until January 6th. Not a horrible job but my knees are getting too old for this. Kneepads, of course, but the straps on those damn things irritated the back of my knees almost as much as kneeling on hard floors did the front.

I did a lot better job of working this room so that I wasn't waiting for things to dry. When I did the hall bathroom back last January, I kept sort of tiling myself into a corner. I was able to work this back to front much better. I also planned and cut the "baseboard" tiles for this one at the beginning instead of as an afterthought. So those went in as I went along and not as a separate job after the floor was done. And the layout came out exactly as I intended with whole tiles at the exact planned spot at the doorway.

Anyway, that's three rooms floored upstairs. That leaves the two guest bedrooms, the master bedroom, the master bathroom, the hall, and the stairs still to go. Thinking of wood for the master bedroom, tile for the master bath, and new carpet for all the rest. As the budget allows.

It was odd after I got this done. Put away the tiling tools and leftover tile. I had the pile of tile boxes, morter mix, etc for this project all piled in the garage for barely short of a year.