Welcome to my world!

This is my living room proofreading setup, established in the months leading up to my hip replacement in early 2013, when sitting in a task chair for hours in my upstairs office became too painful. It began with one laptop and one printer/scanner and has grown to this -- all of which gets used; it's not just OCD spare-hoarding. That's Schooner in the recliner, right where he insists on burrowing even when I'm in there, though with me he prefers lying on his back, the better to snag my arm for attention. That blue cylinder next to him is the pillow he reposes on when I'm hogging most of the seat.

My lapdesk and the pillow it rests on sit atop my proofing draft pile (not much in this photo) on the old revolving bookcase scavenged from a family attic many years ago. The rear laptop runs the printers/scanners and sends/receives jobs; the front laptop handles the Google research, backs up email, does photo editing, and in general is surf city. It can also run the printers/scanners if necessary.

The printer/scanner in this June photo's foreground is the infamous Epson, so prone to scanner failure and eventual demise, now banished upstairs to mere rarely-used backup printer existence. Its replacement is the Lexmark it traded places with, yes, the very machine whose printer function died, then mysteriously revived sua sponte. Why, yes -- yes I do have a lot of hardware. Well, why not? If it needs replacing but is still useful for something, why throw it out? This is why I still have an XP desktop in the upstairs office, vintage 2004, no longer online but still faithfully performing a handful of tasks.

In the lower left corner is a corner of Ted's cage complex. And yes, that's a TV remote on the chair arm; my television sits opposite me, and the kitchen is only steps away. It's true I still find it uncomfortable, even now, to sit for long in the upstairs office, and the afternoon sun streaming in through its west-facing windows makes it hot in summertime, but that's not the only reason why I continue to do most of my work here.