I am not connected to any piece of work, am feeling like I am just in limbo and not called to do anything writing related at all. Yes, the disciplined would say to sit down and just write, which I will likely do, eventually but the frustrating thing is still not feeling like I should write on any one thing. I am hearing no voices. My heart isn’t asking for more of anyone’s story. And I don’t, still, feel committed to a project. Sigh. So I unexpectedly decided to take some time off from work. Normally I wouldn’t do that unless I had a project to work on (or if we were going on a trip but we don’t go on trips). I took Thur/Fri and Mon/Tue off from the day job. Last night we went to go see Wicked (fabulous!). This morning I slept in till 10 (5 hours past my normal get up time) and even now I am just reading blogs and email and sipping my chai.

Goal for the day? Nothing. Goal for the time off. My office. See, I have a weird relation with my office and something must be done about it. We have been in this house a little over a year. My husband and I each have our own offices. He spends much of his evening time in his and me, I take the laptop out to the living room. I have an office filled with my children’s books and writing books. A desk. A big table for overflow. A closet for storing stuff and four four-drawer file cabinet. I have a comfy ergonomic writing chair and a ceiling fan to keep the air moving. So why can’t I work in there? I have no idea. We were in our last itty bitty place for 6 years and I had no choice but to write in the living room. There was no other room. (We tried sharing an office but it was way too small.) All I could think about when I was in that tiny place was how I couldn’t wait until I had, once again, an office of my own. Oh the things I would write, the dedication I would have, the words would pour out across the keyboard. Yeah right. Sigh.

It is filled with things I love and yet I find 101 reasons not to write in there. Okay, one sort of biggie is the desk. It still isn’t right. I found a great smallish desk to hold my laptop with a tray for the keyboard and my roller mouse set-up (great ergo find). I have my laptop and can plug it into a bigger keyboard which is better ergonomically for my shoulder. But the tray that came with the desk, like all desks, was too high. I’m short. 5′ tall. I need, again for ergonomic reasons, to have the tray set at the right height for me. I can raise the chair but then my feet don’t touch the floor and it doesn’t work to put something under my feet. No problem. We got an adjustable keyboard tray and cut the mounting bar to fit on the desk. Ooops. One measurement we didn’t take is how far under the desk the tray would slide. Turns out to be only partway which means I can’t sit at the desk and use it for anything because the tray pokes me in the stomach and I can’t reach the desktop. Sigh. But we are working on that problem. There is still the bigger issue of why I can’t work in that room. So with this time off I am going to try to figure out how to make it mine. I am burning lots of candles, white sage, to cleanse the room of negative energy. (The dog doesn’t even go in that room for some reason.) And I am paring down the excess in the file cabinets, throwing things away so that much of the stuff crammed under the table can go into the cabinets and perhaps give me a cleaner feel for space that is mine?

Other than that, I am at a loss as to what to do to make myself work in there. All pieces of advice, no matter how wacky, greatly appreciated.