Welcome to my Desk! Small Apartment Edition

This third installment of “Welcome to my Desk” (thanks to Rachel and Deborah for the first two!) doesn’t have any cats in it (I’m sad about it too), but it does have yet another Yeti microphone. Here’s where I’ve been sitting, and occasionally standing and squatting, for the past few months.

First: the home office. It’s not quite a separate room – an unattainable luxury with Bay Area housing prices – but I only sit here when at work and I don’t work anywhere else, which has effectively mitigated the sense of being at work all the time. I retrieved the monitor and keyboard from my actual at-work desk after a couple of weeks of hunching over my laptop; the footrest and webcam are more recent additions that are really helping with the home-office neck-pain blues.

 

 

On the ubiquitous IKEA cart (RÅSKOG), I keep the ubiquitous Yeti mic plus pop filter; I’ve done a lot of instructional video recordings this pandemic and am very glad to have it. Also some Vitamin D, books for an article I’m working on, and all the other miscellany that ends up on IKEA carts.

 

 

This picture has two things I thought I’d probably never use but kept anyway, so I feel completely vindicated in my pack-rat tendencies. The little vlex/Casemaker robot is a USB hub, conference swag from the 2018 AALL Annual Meeting. With my mouse, keyboard, webcam, and microphone all connecting via USB, it’s been essential. The port on its left arm is broken, though, in case anyone from vlex or Casemaker is reading this and wants to send me a replacement…. The fancy-looking mousepad came in the mail from my law school a year or so ago (I think I must have sent them some money?), I didn’t need it but it looked too nice to throw away, and now it’s doing an excellent job keeping my mouse from scratching up my desk. The book is a relic of the pre-webcam days (i.e. last week), raising the camera on my laptop to a slightly more flattering height. But it’s a good book too!

A little lower-tech on this side of the desk, but we’ve got headphones, a Bluetooth speaker (it makes Zoom very angry when connected, alas), and the Whale Stapler. I rarely have to staple anything, but it’s always exciting when I do. I do use a lot of post-its; I follow the Getting Things Done productivity method (very loosely), and the in-box on the left is often carpeted with post-its used to capture items as they pop into my head or my email. If you zoom in, you can probably also see what I’ve been doing today (pink notepad) and notes for a current project (the other pile), although good luck deciphering it. The ceramic jug was made by a friend and its contents come from a tree in another friend’s yard, and it’s great to feel connected to them while I stare out the window – I mean, stare diligently at the monitor.

The last item I want to mention, hiding in their tin just behind the monitor, are book darts. Maybe everyone else already uses these, but I only discovered them about a year ago, and I have to spread the word. They slide onto a page to mark the page or passage, and unlike sticky page flags, they are aesthetically pleasing and a delight to use. (Featured book: Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn.)

 

 

 

To close, this is a screw that fell out of my chair when I moved it to take these photos. I’ve examined every inch of the chair and cannot figure out where it came from. If the chair collapses and I break a limb, know that it was in service of the CS-SIS.