Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Moving on.

As I've finished my travels in Spain, I have stopped writing on my travel blog. But I don't feel like I really need to stop writing there, as there are still plenty of adventures to be had in my life apart from a year spent living in Spain. Keeping a blog has been a mostly enjoyable experience and it allows me to keep a chronicle of my doings and thoughts fairly regularly. All in all, I believe it can be rewarding, if only for myself. So I plan to keep a log of my general life happenings here as I go. I suppose it will range from the mundane to the moderately exciting, depending on whether or not I'm traveling or getting into trouble or what have you. 

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For my first post, I'd like to document a project I've been working on this week. I've been looking for ways to keep busy and take my mind off of current stresses, and what better way to do so than cleaning your room (and on the plus side, it pleases my current landlord - mom)? My room, while not terribly dirty or disorganized, was certainly not arranged in the most efficient manner. So last Saturday, I decided to spruce things up and make one of my most frequented areas a bit more user friendly and appealing.

I'll be the first to admit that I have entirely too many books. Getting them to fit in my room in the limited amount of space that I have has always been quite difficult. For the past year or so, most of them were actually stored in another part of my house, which is kind of a shame because I like having lots of books to look at. Even if I never need ten percent of them, they have a nice atmosphere to them. It's probably one of the reasons I'll never fully adopt e-books, though I do enjoy the convenience they provide. So one of my first goals was to make enough space to include my bookshelf of pretty books by getting rid of a small desk/table that a lot of my computer stuff was sitting on.

Secondly, I wanted to clean off the giant wooden computer desk that was once used as the communal desktop in our house. Over the years, it had collected all sorts of different sports paraphernalia and such, which doesn't really fit my room that well (read: at all). Getting rid of all of that cleaned up my desk enough that I could have stopped there and been satisfied. However, my mom has insisted for a while that I clean up all of the wires that connect to the myriad devices I've got hooked up around my room. That turned out to be quite the ordeal, but I managed to do well given the limitations of what I was working with. 

Finally, I wanted to set up my T.V. and video games in such a way that it could be out of the way and clean, hiding all of their wires as well. So I bought a swiveling T.V. mount and hid the wires in a strip that runs up the wall behind my bookshelf. The Wii is "hidden" among books on the top shelf, concealing all of its wires as well. 



Perhaps one of the most important investments I made in all of this was an Xbox 360 controller, which I use with my computer to play some games. It makes platformers much more natural-feeling. To top it all off, it glows blue like my computer. I don't know why the fact that they (mostly) match is that exciting to me, but it is. 


And here it is, finished:

I think the protruding smoke alarm functions fine, it just likes to pop out for no reason all-too-frequently


I really wish I had a before picture for comparison. Just imagine that it was less impressive and that this is a huge improvement and you'll get the picture, more or less.