Looking through my schedule for the techie job today and noticed next week begins two and a half weeks of France time.  New sites to see, new foods, art, history… at least, that’s what I imagine it would be like.  I don’t actually get to go there.  I’m just working France hours from my home office for a customer there.

There was a time with my job where the odds were I’d be traveling there, but oddly, the travel slowed down over the past year.  Honestly, the travel never bothered me.  As a writer, it invigorated my writing jumping from coast-to-coast all the time. 

Small towns.  Big cities.  Middle of nowhere.  Middle of somewhere I only read about in books. 

New accents.  New foods.  New mannerisms.  New traditions.  New people to listen to.

Never found out why my travel got reduced so much, but then I never bothered to ask.  On the plus side, I get to spend more time with my family.  On the down side, it took a while for them to adjust to having so much "dad time".  I guess they got used to me being gone so much and spoiling them on the weekends.  Now, they have to suffer through semi-exciting weekdays and boring (aka not spoiled enough) weekends.  They’ll live. 

But all the time working out of the home office did give me some time to… well, hate how much I neglected my office.  I began an overhaul to make this place more "all day (and some nights) tech warrior + writer by night" friendly. 

  • Picked up a desk to replace the folding tables I used for a decade. 
  • Bought a bunch of Expedit shelves to get my comics, graphic novels, and mini-library organized. 
  • Freed up wall space to hang up inspirational artwork I’ve collected over the years. 
  • And found a nice stand to hold my 42" plasma HDTV (that will become my new monitor when I finish all this).

So while I may be cooped up in this office all day and working strange hours (2am to 11am for those France hours coming up) while everyone around me keeps functioning on Texas time, I can handle it with much more ease… and wonder why it took me so long to set up my office like this.

Oh, right… it was the 75-95% travel year-after-year where my "office" wound up being whatever free cubicle, conference room or server room crash cart a client could spare and then finishing up in a nice clean hotel room at night.  [NOTE TO SELF: need mini-fridge and comfy bed for office now]