focus

I'm not up that early. I have coffee and it's close to ten when I get off to the club for my workout. It's 11:15 when I'm back, get the empty garbage can from the street and sit down to check my mail. I get caught up in trying to take advantage of an intriguing deal on Broadway tickets but the 'buy tickets' button gets 'connection refused.' I then remember that The Hours opens today and look that up on Fandango. I don't guess I could talk FFP into going this afternoon? I need to clean my office and finalize New York stuff. I'm displacing, that's certain.

This it's time for lunch. I eat some raw vegies with some aioli mayo and a Clementine.

Then it's time, it's really time...to clean up my office! I decide to start by moving stuff around to get the printer on my desktop...the one I brought from the upstairs office.This involves moving the scanner and Jaz drive on the opposite side of one machine and moving the printer in their place (reasonably close to another machine to which it is attached). This takes a long time of untangling, disconnecting, reconnecting and testing. At one point I accidentally turn power off on one of the surge supressors. Unfortunately it powers the hub and brings Forrest down to see if I'm having trouble with Internet access. Hm...I didn't mean to disconnect anything he'd notice. Oops.

The problem is that I have three computers, three printers, a scanner, an external Jaz drive, two monitors/keyboards/trackballs (two computers are hooked to one), a DSL modem, an Ethernet Router, a hub, chargers for charging two different kinds of digital camera batteries, a connection for my Palm to a computer, a charger for my cell phone and, two connections for digital cameraas to a computer, a TV, a cable box, three phones, three phone lines, a transmitter for the two line rotary to go to phoneless spots in the house, two clocks, a device that allows the keyboard/monitor/trackball sharing and little piles of CDs, floppies, ZIP disks, Jaz disks. So it's a wire nightmare and one can see why I have a separate electrical circuit and some monster supressors. You add to that a bunch of books, photos, files, unread newspapers and magazines and such and, well, it's a mess and it resists fixing. The wires twist and coil with each other. Occasionally something disconnected and useless is found cohabitating with the important stuff. Sigh.

But this latest rearrangement is a breakthrough of sorts and gives me some room to manuever while I clean. I think.

At that point, I somehow get started cleaning out a little two-shelf thing in the room we call the 'bonus room.' (Did you ever notice that we don't call rooms anything recognizable? It's just to confuse lurkers. Not really, it's what we call the rooms.) On this shelf I find out-of-date film, camera instructions, music books for the trumpet (a brief enthusiasm of FFP's) and quite amazingly a 1997 Harper's magazine with an article that grew to become the book I just finished, Driving Mr. Albert. (Yep, I finished it. I'm reading Paris to the Moon now and will probably stumble on parts of it in the old The New Yorker magazines sitting around.)

I continued working on the piles, but mostly I sorted through the New York box and surfed the WEB trying to figure out what to do while there. The box contains clippings from magazines and newspapers, travel books, maps, e-mails, business cards. We have decided to see the show at the Village Vanguard (a venerable jazz club where we've seen Branford Marsalis and Johnny Griffin and where Joe Lovano will play when we are there). I actually make this reservation.

So, yeah, it doesn't look better, not all that much but I'm starting to feel better about it. Soon it will look worse in here. While the project to get the one printer off a plastic stand and onto the desktop actually improved things (theoretically), I'll probably now imbark on cleaning out the closets, file cabinets (one two-drawer lateral, on four-drawer normal letter, one on wheels), drawers (six in desk, six in closet), Elfa cart, bookshelves and Palaset cubes. So things will be messier. For a while. Maybe. See, as you can see from the above it's not like I don't have enough storage. Something has to give.