The new place is starting to come together nicely. There are still a few bits of crap lying around the place so I won’t share any photos just yet, and there’s still a whole heap of crap waiting for us to go and pick up from Andie’s mum’s at some point soon (plus the rats… I miss the rats) but on the whole, it’s coming together pretty well.

I spent a large proportion of this morning sorting out the room that has become my “study”. It’s significantly larger than the room I was using for a similar purpose in our previous place, and there’s a lovely large amount of open space in the middle, giving the whole thing a… well, sort of spacious feel.

The one nice thing about all this space is the fact that I can reconfigure it for various purposes. Perhaps the most exciting thing (exciting to me, all right, I’m sure you don’t give a shit) is that there is enough room for my two gigantic and heavy wooden desks to be arranged separately, meaning that the smaller of the two can be a permanent fixture as my computer desk, but the larger of the two can sit at the side of the room as a general purpose work surface for most of the time, but when required it can be pulled out and used as — wait for it — a games table. Finally, the dream of having a Room for Board Games appears to have come true.

I am yet to try it for this proposed purpose, but there’s certainly plenty of space available to do this, and there’s some spare chairs we’ll be able to use. The nice thing about the giant desk is that it’s actually bigger than our dining table, which has proven itself on several occasions to be not quite big enough to play the more sprawling games comfortably. The giant desk, meanwhile, will quite happily house Arkham Horror with space to spare — though whether or not it will be able to handle a particularly winding dungeon in The Legend of Drizzt or Advanced Heroquest remains to be seen.

I got my electric piano set up again today, and have retrieved some of my music books. I haven’t been feeling that motivated to play for quite a long time, what with everything else that has been going on in my life and all the things I’ve wanted to prioritise and aim for, but having this nice big room with all my music on display will hopefully get me playing a bit more. It will certainly stop people making pointed comments about how they wish I’d play the piano more. (Or perhaps it will encourage them more.)

Anyway, things are coming together nicely, in short. This is a nice feeling, and it’s good to be feeling like this just before Christmas. This has, of course, had the side-effect that Christmas has completely snuck up on me almost without me realising it, but at least I have managed to get all the appropriate shopping done. I think. Possibly. I hope. I’m almost certain I will wake up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and realise I’ve forgotten presents for someone important, but we’ll cross that particular bridge when we come to it.

It’s got to 1am somehow. It’s probably time to sleep. Today has been incredibly long in the sense that both Andie and I have got a lot done. Days “feel” longer here for some reason. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of being in a nice place that we like. Or perhaps we’re just using our time more efficiently. Either way, I’m not complaining!