TL/DR – I am now working from home and have an hour a day I don’t have to do the round trip to and from work Monday through Friday, and will have more time to focus on living life and preparing and playing games.

My company decided to close our local office because there are only three of us and have us work from home. Two other office are being closed, each with two employees, and having them work from home, saving the company over $100K a year in rent. Too bad I don’t get a piece of that. At least I get to save on gas and have an hour more each day for other things since I don’t have to drive to work. I really like avoiding driving in winter and saving money on gasoline and wear and tear on my car.

Last weekend, I packed up my office and hauled everything home except my desk. I will miss my desk. It is just too big for my house. We have three desks to get rid of. At least I got my desk chair. The cheap one I have from Wal-Mart is wearing out.

I spent five hours moving some things out of my home office to make room so I could move in my work office stuff. I got it all to fit. This inspired me to clean and organize. I already had three 5-shelf bookcases in here and a smaller bookcase. I moved in two 2-drawer file cabinets and put my shorter bookcase on top of them. I brought a five shelf bookcase from the office and a little rolling file cabinet with a “desk top” and a small drawer and a big file drawer.

This gave me storage space to make it all fit even better and a half-done job of organizing a few months ago. Of the three bookshelves I had in here to start, one is nearly organized the way I want it, the second is partially organized with two shelves in a holding pattern, and the third has three empty shelves and two for temporary holding. I have my AD&D manuals and some of my campaign notes on one shelf of the work bookcase. They say that you’re only supposed to touch each thing once, but the sorting of getting everything out is not so easy with cats and dogs and other people in the same house. It’s like one of those number puzzles where you shift the numbers in odd ways until you sort them in order. It may not be efficient, but I have found several things I have been looking for and I now have room to speed up the sorting. If you hadn’t seen it before I started, you wouldn’t think the way it looks now is an improvement.

I had my office at work mostly decluttered, but had a buildup of stuff to sort and toss. I look forward to having a place for everything and everything in its place. Soon I will have all my AD&D manuals, campaign information and other active game related materials together on one or more shelves of a bookcase for easy access. I am good at decluttering and sorting through files while on hold or if calls ever slow down.

If they will ever get the last few clients off a DOS based series of products, for which I am the main support tech, I can pitch 6 or 8 binders, or rather pitch their contents and re-purpose the binders for game materials.

I will also have room for my few board games so that I can keep all of that stuff together. If the bug bites, I might even sell off the stuff I don’t and realistically, won’t use.

Over the years, I have accumulated a lot of floppies, CDs, and odd bits of computer related tech that is old and obsolete. I can sit here and feed floppies to an old PC in the corner and determine if I need the data. If there is a market for used floppies, I can get something out of them. I would like to avoid the landfill…. I remember when a 1.44 MB 3.25 inch floppy was considered a lot of space. Now all these floppies would fit on one DVD with room to spare…..

As I look around and think about some of this stuff, there is a lot that I have not even touched since I divorced my wife four years ago. I’m finally able to get out some breakables and display them, like my great-grandfather’s pocket watch in a glass covered display stand.

My dog likes it because I don’t need to put her in her kennel while I’m at the office. I can also let her out multiple times throughout the day. If I get stuck and have to work through my lunch hour or work late, I have food here and don’t have to rush out and buy crap. There are not many choices in my village for a healthy lunch, so I won’t be spending money eating out for lunch very often, if at all. No more getting home at 5:30 or 6:00 and not having supper until 8:00 or 8:30.

Once it warms up, I can set up by wi-fi and work outside, or in the garage, or on the deck. I can lounge in my hammock on my lunch hour.

Life is good! The level of order I prefer in my life and living environment is rapidly coming together.