Working spaces

Now that my husband works from home, he often bemoans that he's stuck in a cold, dark basement office with only a block window to let in the light. And that's not the only thing he has reason to complain about, believe me.

For one, if I'm working at my large, brown desk, which is set kitty corner and faces said block window, and he's at his rather uncomfortably small, white desk, you can bet that the three animals in our household that take stairs willingly -- Darwin, Magellan, and Rusty -- will be here with us.

The picture above is one my husband took this week, when Darwin was marauding around his desk. The chair from under which Darwin was gazing up at him is one that we had to place near my husband's desk, with a pillow on top, so that Magellan (the empress of this household) can sleep there whenever she wants. If that chair and pillow are not there, then she tries to walk all over his laptop's keyboard (she already took out the key to one letter!) and/or lie on his lap, where he often places his laptop to be more comfortable.

Then there's the dog, Rusty, who for some reason must lie right against the legs of my husband's chair, instead of anywhere else on the softly carpeted floor. That means that if he moves back an inch when he's ready to stand up, he's stepping on the dog. Rusty also has a plethora of unpleasant sounds (nevermind the weapon of mass destruction-level chemical emissions that come from under his tail sometimes), which include slurping and chewing his paws, scratching his ears, and periodically licking his private parts.

And then there's Darwin. Although he's taken to pestering my husband more often now that he's working down here, Darwin's favorite place to perch is between my arms as I'm typing on this computer. Sometimes it's adorable, and sometimes it's downright annoying, especially when I'm trying to get something done on deadline, such as finishing the revisions to my dissertation so I can have it copied, bound and delivered to the committee on Friday.

My husband also has to put up with all my grunts and groans and sighs of exasperation as I deal with various annoyances, from computer glitches to misplacing the books and photocopies I need to finish the dissertation's bibliography.

Thus, it's not strange to hear my husband day-dreaming about the office he wants to have in our new house, or in the house we build at some point in our lives. His latest scheme, which I don't find very appealing, is building an office in the garage so he can put both his two main work passions together. What he also wants is to ensure that he has a cat- and dog-free zone to work in (and I think there's a little in there about having an office to himself, too).

As we've set the house up for showing (and we haven't had a one since last week's open house when 3 people showed up -- 2 of them a couple!), we moved the nice stereo down here to the office and I was looking forward to listening to classical music as I finished the last touches on my Monster. Alas, that's not to be because my husband doesn't like working to any kind of music, not even Vivaldi or Mozart. Thus, all you can hear in our office during daytime is the kikitiklak of our keyboards, and the birds chirping happily outside.

The good thing is that when we move to our apartment in the woods at the small college on the hill, he'll have his own office, with a large picture window facing the treed courtyard, and I'll be able to use my own, very nice little office in my department's home building.

In the meantime, our shared working spaces, while not ideal, aren't terrible either. I guess that if one of the worse things that they entail is having to deal with one imperious, spoiled cat; another one that's totally hyperactive and will never mature from a kitten into a cat (although he's all of 7 years old!); and a noisy, smelly dog, then we can both put up with it for a while longer while we both dream of what our new home will be.