Work From Home, Computers & Renovation Projects

Yakima Valley College is online for nearly all classes this quarter and for winter quarter, just like we have been since March. At our house, this means three people (and three cats) are home, together, all the time, two of them trying to do school, and the other one doing fairly extensive home renovation projects.

The cats did not approve change. Furniture moving, window seats disrupted, hiding spaces uncovered. Why doesn't everybody just lie down and rest instead. Unless you're going to feed us?!

In spring, my "work-from-home office" was mostly the dining table with my work laptop. I tried using my desktop Mac, but the room we use as an office has literally two plugs and one light, so if I used Zoom or tried to record a video, the lighting was really bad (worse than the lighting in all the pictures in this post, even). My desk also faced the wall, meaning that everything (and everyone) in the room showed up in my background. I couldn't use a Zoom background either, because the poor lighting caused my face to be treated as the background. And, I couldn't add a light, because the two plugs in the room were already in use.

One of the two plugs in this room. seems legit.

So, I mostly used my work laptop at the dining table. I was able to sit with my back to the wall and a lovely Kristin Michael (psst, this is a link to her Etsy shop, go buy her Scout ham stickers!) print behind my head. Usually I packed everything up in a stack on a chair beside me when it was dinner time. Occasionally dinner happened next to a Zoom meeting I was attending ;-)

Kristen Michael print in my dining room/zoom office (I never seem to notice how bad the lighting is until I take a photo.)

During the summer and into this fall quarter I have still be using the dining table/laptop/Kristen Michael setup for Zoom meetings, but I also continued to use my Mac for some stuff, especially union stuff. In fact, I got into a habit that at the time seemed efficient, but in retrospect should have alerted me to trouble. When the Mac would be really slow to load a program or a page, I would walk into the dining room and work on something else using the laptop. When the laptop, likewise, slowed down, I'd walk back to the Mac in the other room. I figured I was getting exercise and being efficient, but things might have been more efficient, if not more physical, if either computer could handle what I needed it to do.

Current dining room/office setup (ugh, that light)

Of course I also have used my phone a lot. My home clay studio doesn't get very good WiFi, so I use my phone to record videos, then I come back into the main house to upload the videos directly to YouTube, bypassing my iMac which takes 16 years to open iMovie. I was hoping to use these spy glasses I bought for video demonstrations, but they stopped working and I haven't had the energy to figure out if I can get them working again. I've also started uploading images of Design work directly from my Phone because iPhoto on my computer takes just 2 years to open, but another year to actually let me do anything.

The walls are blue except where they are grey, the floor has paint everywhere, the window trip is dirty white, the wall just above the windows is white, and the walls have stripes from the lath and plaster. (We don't always have a crowbar hanging on the wall.)
 

In around the second week of the quarter I was in a 10 minute meeting with a student where I got kicked out maybe 4-5 times. I then had to attend another meeting with colleagues using my phone. (Zoom on a computer is annoying. Zoom on a phone is the worst!) I assumed the issue was the internet, so I called Spectrum, and spend valuable work time waiting on hold and resetting the router. At that point, the work laptop speed improved, but not my desktop (or my phone). So I called Apple and after about a week or two of trying things I finally admitted that my 2012 iMac is no longer a fully-functioning machine. 

yeah, sure, that's what color that desktop picture is supposed to be

Just today, I have been writing this blog on my Mac (obviously, it's not school work), and I could not get it to load images except for screenshots. Apparently I can upload photos from my phone onto my blog. My daughter keeps laughing at me for using two computers for everything. Shows what she knows; I've been using three!

Surprisingly valuable tool this quarter: tripod with a cell phone mount. It is tipped forward to I can record from above.

A few weeks into the quarter, I am accustomed to things being super slow, needing to walk between rooms, and looking at tiny pictures on my work laptop. I even stopped booting up my Mac. The other day, in a last ditch effort to will the machine into new life, I booted it up and did some grading. The laptop screen is about the size of a piece of computer paper. The iMac has a 21.5" screen. And what a difference that size makes when grading artwork! I can actually see what they've made.

One of several pictures/videos showing students how to make-shift a clean photo background in their home work space

This past week I ordered a replacement desktop (with an even bigger screen!) and I have marked the day of its arrival in my planner in great anticipation. I am very much looking forward to relearning how to work without artificial delays (lol, remember the internet in 1996?). SoftChalk, which I use A LOT for all three classes, crashes regularly on my Mac, but using it on my laptop is barely better as the text becomes very, very, excessively wide (editing view is different than how it shows up in a browser). Editing Canvas pages on my laptop makes me cry, because I sometimes accidentally brush my fingertip or my sleeve across the trackpad and all the editing I've done for the past hour (or two) will magically disappear. Neither computer will consistently allow me to highlight text in Canvas's SpeedGrader features.

SoftChalk is neat as an interactive, but annoying too. I've been making one lesson per week for Design, based on lessons for Art History, but it isn't possible to copy/paste tool tips, images, and activities so I have to do a lot of re-making. Just today I discovered two erroneous tool tips in this two-week old lesson that copied incorrectly from a different lesson. Sigh. 

Granted, some of the blame belongs to Canvas (and SoftChalk). I am convinced that some of Canvas's idiosyncrasies are designed specifically to be cruel to teachers. Every other civilized app or program auto-saves (Outlook, Google Docs, Blogger), why can't Canvas? Outlook saves things I don't even want saved; Oh, you clicked the wrong button because your computer is slow and now there's a blank email addressed to L (not an abbreviation), I supposed you want Outlook to save that blank email FOREVER. But Canvas allows me to lose an hour of text and edits if I don't remember to save at regular intervals (even though students might get an alert about those intermediate saves if I'm editing a published page). 

This basement crawl space has been converted into Legoland (plus train tracks and RC cars)

There's been another huge change in my working space this week. My husband, who took a sabbatical before the pandemic, has been working on house projects ever since. He painted the house, redid my clay studio, did an extensive project to reclaim the basement crawl space (terrible picture above), and is now starting on the computer room.  Which means we needed to clear out our desks, computers, file cabinets, bookshelf, and other stuff from that room. This also allowed us the opportunity to ask each other why we have so much stuff.

The custom-built bookshelf is too tall to fit in the clay studio, and to big for any other wall in the house.

As of Thursday, our dining table is smaller (we took out a leaf), and my Kristen Michael computer space is inaccessible (because we moved the table. My computer desk is now taking up nearly half the dining room, and my school books are now in a drawer in the file cabinet (because the bookshelf is outside). Meanwhile the custom made bookshelf is outside, the books are in a pile on the floor, and my husband's desk is in the living room.

The view behind my desk. Only the Tieton River poster (by Justin Gibbens) shows up in the Zoom, but there's a Cheryl Hahn painting in the top right (and my daughter's cat in the rain below).

In someways, though, even a doing room desk is an upgrade. I now have access to two (count em!) two plugs, allowing my laptop to be on the same desk as my desktop--and both are plugged i! I can use the same desk for Zoom meeting (with a Tieton River Canyon poster in the background and both a ceiling light and a window lighting my face). I can alternate between standing and sitting set-ups without moving the computer. The main disadvantage is that the cats don't have room to sit in the window next to me.

My homemade standing desk (utilizing small pedestals and a cardboard box). My laptop is under the planner next to the window.

I'm pretty excited about the computer room renovation, actually, even if it does mean that all of our other rooms are extra crowded right now as they swell to accommodate books, files, desks, etc. The main problem with the room is the aforementioned lack of outlets. The floor in the room is pretty bad, too. When we moved in there was fairly ugly blue carpet that matched the baby blue walls (and the baby blue carpet in the bathroom). We abused the carpet pretty badly because we didn't like it, and finally pulled it out to reveal hardwood underneath. The hardwood, though, has paint all over it, and stains, and even carpet staples we never took out. We've had a rug over it, but it was always something we intended to refinish or replace eventually.

The wood would look nice, I suppose, if it weren't covered in paint.

 

The baby blue walls are my least favorite in the house. The color is what I describe as soggy baby teddy bear. It makes me want to put doilies on tables, buy Precious Moments figures, and carpet my toilet seat lid. The color makes me think of the kinds of sappy, droopy, soggy teddy bears that get put on baby blankets and onesies. I think the intent, there, is that they be perceived as cute (or maybe they were a futile attempt to convince people that babies sleep a lot) but they always made me cringe.

I've reached the end of my edits for this post, which, unfortunately, means I need to go find a place to put these books.