The sad thing is that Gray Cat has no way of knowing that her weeks-long attempt to climb the floor-to-ceiling pile in the corner of my office has ended with the successful conquering of Grayskull. That’s too cool.

…except me, and even I’m tentative.

I’ve gone on and on about this office cleanout, to the point where some may be wondering why cleaning a room is such a big deal.

All I can say is that when a mess grows to such incredible volume that you literally lock the door and pretend the offending room doesn’t exist for around six goddamned years, yes, it’s a pretty big deal to reclaim some semblance of sanity in your home life.

Even after throwing and giving away thousands of dollars’ worth of ill-thought purchases, I still have quite a bit left. The bins shown above (thank you, Creator of Bins, I will forever worship you) are only a portion of the stuff I deemed “keep-worthy.”

There are so many amazingly post-worthy treasures in those bins. One thing I’ve always been proud of with X-E is the stream of really obscure artifacts, and boy, this is the motherload. It’ll be fun to finally get some use out of this junk.

Mostly though, I’m just happy to be climbing out of the absurdity that’s been our home life for so long. Our apartment is by no means large enough to easily write off a room as a tomb, and besides, in doing so, all of the other nonsense I’ve picked up has had a habit of spilling into every other room. Boxes under the kitchen table. DVD shelves used to display cool soda cans. It really hit that point where I was ready to torch the place and run.

Now I’m up to the fun part: Painting. I refused to go through this process just to end up with the same office, with the “old cake” colored walls and the cheap wooden shelving. Gonna go with bright colors, maybe one for each wall, and I won’t be satisfied until my office looks like a kid’s bedroom from a 1987 sitcom.

I want it to inspire me. For years now, I’ve commandeered other parts of the apartment as my work station. Most notably our dining room table, which is ridiculous for a hundred reasons, and not exactly conducive to creative doings.

So excited, especially because I have a shiny new Mac that I refuse to touch until the office is completed.

I’m slowly scraping the Christmas off of X-E. God, does this site need a redesign. There are so many deadweight links, and the entire infrastructure is so dated and impossible to tweak. Funny, since I remember a time when the site’s presentation was the biggest thing going for it.  

So that’s on the list, too. I described my office walls as “old cake,” and that’s how I’ve felt about the site for years. Now that I think about it, the reason I write so much during Halloween has as much to do with the freshened designs as it does my love for Dracula. (And, while I have other reasons for posting so much on here lately, the “new car smell” is a big one. It’s been a long time since I’ve smelled new cars online.)

Realizing that this has been nothing more than a guarded diary entry, I suppose I should give something back to those who waddled through it.

There. A picture of Gray Cat, imitating a mogwai ball.

Holy shit, it’s 4 in the morning.

#freelancer