Welcome, once again to our weekly feature: Clutter Cave Dispatches.  It was a busy week and rather than having some spare time to work on the Cave like usual, I was at work in all-day training sessions all week that were both interesting and exhausting.  I was so tired on Friday night, when I usually take photos and post the dispatch, there was nothing left in the tank so I went to bed ridiculously early.  So, without any further delay, let’s get to the photos.

The Desk view, Saturday morning, January 28, 2012:

Comparing last week’s photo to this week’s photo is akin to one of those can you spot the differences picture puzzles.  The water bottle from last week is gone, the Steve Jobs book moved and there’s some rearrangement around the laptop, but that’s all.

Wide View, Saturday morning, January 28, 2012:

Playing the same game of spot the differences I detect some movement of stuff on the top of the toybox and the blue box on the table in the foreground has disappeared.  Oh, and a comforter has been added to Louis’s bed and there’s a Louis in the bed.  How dare he clutter up Clutter Cave with his presence!

My excuses have been stated above about how busy work kept me this week, draining all energy to forge ahead with continued de-cluttering.

I will take a moment to pat myself on the back for sustaining the cleanliness of the Cave.  It is all too easy when life gets busy and stressful to backslide, or relapse, into previous cluttering behaviour.

Being able to keep things at status quo this week was a victory for me and I am confident that this experiment in behaviour modification involving public shaming and reporting progress will succeed.

Clutter assessment:

Desk clutter: <5% (no change)

Shelf clutter:  <5% (no change)

Toy box top clutter: 85% (no change)

Overall Clutter Cave Clutter: 25% (no change)

Last week I made reference to an “enhancement” that I was quite excited about.  Only neat freaks, geeks, and Apple fan boys will be excited about this, and I fall into two or three of those groups so bear with me for a few pictures about how the laptop lives on the desk.

Before:

Here we see the laptop sitting handsomely next to the cinema display with all the cables hooked up.  From this view it looks quite neat and tidy and you might not even notice that it isn’t sitting directly on the desk.  When I was ripping all of our DVDs into files several months ago I realized the need for greater ventilation to keep things cool as lots of heat was generated.  That was when I propped the laptop up on whatever was handy.  This is what was handy:

An empty ice wine box, and a wire business card holder.  Classy, I know, but it met my needs at the time.  With the cleaning of clutter cave I was unhappy with this ad hoc arrangement and wanted something that looked better and was designed with the purposes I hastily met with Clutter Cave junk.   After a little bit of searching I found something that had lots of positive reviews and the description and pictures had me sold:

I wasn’t paid to write a review or promote this stand in anyway so there are no links to it – you can use Google to seek it out yourself if you so desire.  The mStand from Rain Design captures the Apple aesthetic and provides the improved cooling that I was looking for in putting the laptop on a stand.  I’ve always been a naysayer when it comes to laptop stands so this is new territory for me.

There it is, in place, looking almost the same as the wooden box and business card holder from this angle.  It does sit higher which I wasn’t sure about initially but I’m already used to it and it encourages better posture.  The change is far more dramatic in the next image.

Very nicely I can tuck the keyboard and mouse under the laptop now when I need more desk space to work.  Thank you for indulging my geeky, Apple fan boy, neat freakishness.

I thought that this would be the end of improvements to Clutter Cave but this week we made an acquisition that sits in the hallway where I take the wide shots of Clutter Cave from.  Although it’s not technically in the Cave, it’s location enhances the Cave and it is awesome enough to make an appearance in next week’s Clutter Cave Dispatch.