Moving Mountains and Furniture

No time for a chatty post today because I absolutely, positutely must submit three FAFSAs by midnight tonight (no, it's not an imposed deadline; it's my own internal deadline).

But I thought I'd check in briefly from my NEW OFFICE. (No, I didn't say "new job," though I continue to have some action and high hopes on that front, and will fill you in when everything's settled.) For at least a year now I've been working from the dining room table and, as much as I liked being in the thick of things, the unending mess in the diningroom began to make the entire house seem disheveled.

The room we'll always call "Laura's room" had a small desk in it, but I knew that, in order to settle in there I'd need a bigger desk. So yesterday (and until this morning at 3:30 AM!) we moved all kinds of furniture: the funky Ikea desk that was in Kat's room will be given away, and it was replaced with the small desk form Laura's room (and since Kat carries her laptop all over the house, she hardly ever uses a desk anyway), and the bigger desk from the family room (see photo below) was brought upstairs to Laura's room -- my new office.

You like? The body ball is the best part, I think. My back has been killing me from using a diningroom chair, which was meant to be sat in for the duration of a meal, as an all-day office chair. Hopefully this body ball will cure what ails me.

But what's really nice is that the house finally feels tidier. Do you even recognize the diningroom?

And Tom really opened up the family room by moving his 50 gallon aquarium to the other side of the room so the poor fishies feel more like part of the family. I tell ya, the guy has such a heart!

Oh, and the moving mountains part? I exaggerated. I went to a local AFS restructuring meeting today and volunteered to work on a teen-to-teen recruitment proposal, so maybe I'll paly a small role in moving a tiny ant hill. But hey -- every mountain begins with a hill, right?