A new desk, and a tribute to the old one

Short version of this post: my wonderful husband spent three hours putting together a flat-pack desk for me, early last week. This was the result:

For those who like to read my ramblings, here's the longer version:

When we first moved to Cyprus, quarter of a century ago, we bought some furniture inexpensively from the organisation my husband was seconded to. Much of it was quite old and well-used, but also solid and likely to last at least as long as it had already. One of those pieces of furniture was a heavy desk which we put in my study, where I had my computer: 

At some point both the computer and the screen were upgraded by my husband and sons, and we acquired a scanner. The desk stayed in the same place, easily able to hold these, a large keyboard, and whatever books or other random additions I needed: 

When we moved to our current house, sixteen-and-a-half years ago, we discussed whether I might like something smaller. I already had a flat screen and a more compact keyboard by that stage. But I was quite attached to the desk. It had four good-sized drawers and a cupboard on the other side, and I liked the old-fashioned wood look. So some strong people who helped us to move carried it up the stairs to my new, larger study, and there it sat: 

This study had a lot more scope for moving furniture around. That happened several times, leading to, for instance, this: 

And, later, this:

.. which is where it remained since about 2016, facing the door. This is my preferred orientation for the desk. I did move other furniture around, but the desk stayed where it was. 

About a year ago, the desk started to become a bit wobbly. Perhaps all the moving had weakened one of those legs. They are quite small compared to the size of the desk. Having a large cat jumping on and off probably didn't help, either, but the desk, we reckoned, was probably fifty years old. It didn't owe me anything. I wondered whether I might be able to find something similar, with stronger legs.  

I looked at several possible shops online, none of which had desks I liked. Those they had in the shops seemed extortionately priced. I would have shrugged and forgotten about it, until one day I realised the wobbliness was worse. One of the front legs had become detached. 

Creative as ever, Richard found a temporary solution:

This was shortly after I had upgraded my elderly computer and laptop into a newer laptop that could be used with my screen, keyboard, mouse (etc) while not travelling. Richard made me (from scratch) a very nice wooden shelf to raise the screen, and to house the laptop. 

Inevitably there were a lot of wires, as well as the speaker, and a kind of hub thing which enabled the laptop to connect to the screen and other peripherals. Our white cat Alex liked sleeping on the desk, knocking off anything that came in his path. Hence the rough cardboard box, in stark contrast to the  pristine wooden shelf:

We spent a morning, early last summer, looking for possible replacement desks. We tried the Thrift Store, a couple of second-hand furniture shops and several large stores which sold desks of all shapes and sizes. We didn't see anything I really liked. I didn't want a modern streamlined table with movable drawer units, nor a metal desk. Since I had a (mostly) functioning desk, I was only going to replace it if I found one that felt absolutely right. 

Richard wondered whether he could repair the broken leg. It would have meant considerable disruption, but he thought he might possibly do it while I was away last summer. In the event, he was so busy he didn't have a moment to himself, let alone the time needed to find a way to repair it that was going to last, and which would also need to have strengthened the other legs. If one breaks, we realised, it's probably not long before others follow suit. 

So the dictionaries remained in place. Richard said, once or twice, that he should think about repairing the desk, but I was reluctant to go through all the hassle of disconnecting everything and emptying out the drawers and moving the desk...

Then, nearly two weeks ago, the computer refused to connect to the screen. That happened a couple of times before and Richard had shown me a sequence of unplugging wires and re-starting the computer that seemed to work. 

Not this time. And when I tried to follow the wires to their sources, wondering if something had become unplugged, I realised that the hub conversion gadget thing had no lights on. Re-plugging that didn't help. Without it, there was no chance of connecting to the screen. I could use the laptop as a laptop but nothing else, and it looked as though the computer was not even charging...

Richard wasn't home, and I was due to meet my younger son and daughter-in-law online for a crossword-solving session.  Thankfully my son is familiar with the system, and managed to talk me through - on the phone - plugging in the charging cable, and also temporarily enabling the printer so I could print out the crossword they sent me. 

So the solving session happened, and we successfully completed another tricky one. 

Since the hub thing (Richard calls it a 'breakout box', and its official name is 'multi-port adapter') was less than a year old, and did not seem to be working at all, we took it back to Stephanis in the evening. They said they would send it away for repair. It would probably take about a week, they said. 

So I had to use the laptop with its built-in keyboard (which is okay) and touch-pad (which I don't like at all) and its small screen for the next ten days until it was finally acknowledged that the hub/box/adapter was broken, and they supplied a new one. 

BUT...

In the meantime, I was looking on the Superhome Centre website and happened to see a desk which looked ideal. I mentioned it tentatively to Richard, as I'm always reluctant to replace things that aren't totally broken. He said he thought I should get it. We went to have a look, and made an order, and a couple of days later went - in our van - to collect it. 

Richard hoped it might be in three separate pieces (two sides and a top) rather than all put together as he thought it could be rather heavy to get upstairs. What we had not expected was a single flatpack box, reminiscent of Ikea, but with considerably more parts. The advantage of that was that we could carry it up in several trips. The disadvantage was that it was evidently going to need a significant amount of time to put together. 

The instructions had no words after the first page, and suggested that it would take two hours for two people to put together:

I removed the drawers from the old desk, while Richard disconnected and removed the wires and peripheral computer bits and pieces. Then we managed to lift the old desk into the living room, and ran the Roomba in the space underneath, where it hadn't been able to get before. 

He then used the old desk as a workbench to start constructing the new one:

There wasn't anything I could do to assist in the actual construction, but I did empty out the two large bags of screws, dowels and other bits of metal and plastic, and sorted them:

I then passed over each item as needed. I didn't begin to understand the pictorial 'instructions', but Richard had no difficulty. This, I realised, is why building Lego models from instructions is an important life skill. Freestyle building is more creative, but for something as complex as this desk, I wanted it to be built as designed by the manufacturer rather than a creative model that might be more interesting, but would probably be less useful.

I did assist about three times, holding things that needed to be screwed in place, and moving completed parts out of the way. But I'm not sure that having a second competent pictorial-instruction-follower would have made it much quicker.  It took about three hours in all. I felt a bit guilty: had I known it would be this complex, I wouldn't ever have mentioned it. 

However, the resulting desk is exactly right. It's not as deep as the old one, and the drawers are, therefore, smaller. I was able to get rid of some ancient paperwork and other stuff that was unneeded, and they are much better organised. 

This all happened a week before we were able to pick up the new hub/adapter thing, so I had to use my laptop without the add-on peripherals. But it gave Richard a chance to think how to get the wires reasonably neatly stored so that (1) they weren't on the desk getting in my way, or pushed over by cats (2) they weren't on the floor (where the Roomba might try to eat them) and (3) they weren't dangling at the back, where the cats would want to play with them, and pull things off the desk. 

One of the features of the desk is that instead of having four drawers on the left, there are three, with a shelf at the top. So Richard drilled a few neat holes in the back. My hubs, hard drives and random essential wires are able to be housed there, out of sight, and yet not too difficult to access if needed:

Alex's cardboard box was looking very tatty, but he still likes it, so I covered it with some sticky-backed paper, and put it on the scanner rather than the desk. He's not as keen on it as he was, but in this rather chilly time of year he prefers to sleep on a beanbag anyway.

And the old desk...? 

Some teenage friends have been doing some outside painting for us. They came the morning after Richard built the desk, and were happy to help us move the old one down, prior to taking it to the dump. Our indoor cat, Lady Jane, has twice raced between our legs as we come in the front door, and down the stairs to the desk. She didn't want to escape, just to smell it and roll around underneath. Thankfully she was easily bribed indoors again. She hasn't tried to get out for a long time but evidently saw the desk from the upstairs balcony, and recognised it. 

Since we don't want her getting out - she has no road sense - we were thinking about getting it to the dump, when another young friend said he had a use for it, as a kind of outdoor work bench (under shelter) with different, taller legs that he will construct. I had felt a little sad about abandoning the desk entirely, so am very pleased that it will still be useful. 

Changing our phone/internet provider, and a surprising consequence

Back in October of last year, I wrote a post called 'Images of autumn', which was a rather pretentious-sounding title for what was essentially a summary of several unconnected occurrences which I had not got around to writing about.

Amongst them was this picture of my newly-reorganised study, except that I have managed to add a little arrow near the bottom left:

The arrow shows where our wireless router was put, beside the tall bookcase, connected to the cables that can be seen (if you enlarge the photo) running untidily along behind my chair. 

A couple of months ago, Tim was looking at the costs of various phone companies that now operate in Cyprus, and commented that we could save ten euros per month AND have faster speed if we switched from CYTA - the national company - to Cablenet. We would also, for the first time, get access to cable television. Not that we watch any television, but the occasional news broadcast might be nice, and there was no package that did not include this. 

Various people had experienced good things with this company, so we went to enquire, and made the necessary arrangements. Richard and Tim spent a lot of time deciding how the house could better be wired, and said that the router would have to be behind our television. 

The workmen arrived when they said they would, and after doing some noisy drilling and installing, followed by some tweaking by Richard and Tim (this is about as technical as I get) we now have this arrangement:

And this is what we see on the wall behind:

The television, bizarrely, only shows us black-and-white pictures, because (apparently) there's something wrong with it, or perhaps it's too old (all of seven-and-a-half years), but no worries. Cablenet Internet works, and Richard returned the CYTA router at the end of last month. If CYTA ever manage to get their act together, our phone - on the same number - should work on Cablenet too.

Meanwhile, on an entirely unconnected subject - or so I thought - middle age has been creeping up on me. Last October, a few weeks after I re-started my walks with Sheila, I realised that I was getting backache. I put it down to carrying a heavy belt-bag with my purse and camera, so I stopped taking it. This helped slightly, but I still found my back was aching very badly any time I had been shopping, or if I spent more than about half an hour standing in the kitchen. 

I tried heat, I tried stretching, I tried wearing different shoes. Most of the time it was chronic rather than seriously painful, but there were moments when the twinges meant I had to sit down. Buying a shopping trolley from Lakeland made it easier to do the shopping, and we started getting most of our groceries by car on Fridays.  

But still, my back ached almost continually. I became gradually resigned to it, moving more carefully, doing less in the kitchen, carrying nothing I could avoid. 

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly realised that my back was not aching. I stood in the kitchen doing various things, and was entirely without pain. It seemed so unusual that I commented on it; I assumed it was a temporary reprieve from the back pain, but it continued. I had not realised quite how continual the ache had become  until I was without it. I noticed it as I came downstairs, as I sat on the floor to put my shoes on, as I got up from my beanbag, as I was able, once more, to do things in the kitchen for an hour or more.

This happy state of affairs has continued. There's still a bit of an ache when I wake in the mornings; I suspect we need a new mattress, or at least a mattress topper. But it goes within a few minutes. And that's it for the day! I've had no painful twinges, and moving is, once again, easy. I'm still avoiding any heavy lifting, and I'm using my shopping trolley - no point taking unnecessary risks - but I am very much appreciating having a back which no longer aches almost continually. 

A few days after my backache so mysteriously vanished, we were talking somewhat about electromagnetic sensitivity: a long name for an increasing condition, where people are (or become) sensitive to mobile phones, or wifi devices. I have never liked mobile phones - in the early days they all gave me a tingling sensation in my hands, almost like a mild electric shock - and although modern ones are better, I still have a problem with smartphones, or even my Kindle when the wi-fi is switched on. We used to think I was some kind of over-sensitive freak; in recent years we have met more and more people with the same kind of sensitivity. 

Then, idly browsing on the topic, I came across this article about electromagnetic sensitivity. Symptoms are far wider than a bit of tingling. I browsed some more, and found a surprising number of anecdotes about people who had aches and pains of all kinds, often headaches, which disappeared as soon as a wireless device - or router - was moved further away.  The 'problems' seem to happen when a device was closer than a metre to a sensitive person.

And, yes... this is where the diverse topics of this post converge. When we thought about it, we realised that the day my backache vanished so unexpectedly was the same day that Richard took the old wireless router back to CYTA. The one which had been about 60cm away from my back whenever I sat at my desk. Which is at least two or three hours per day, often more.  Prior to my re-organising of my study (and prior to my backache) the router had been in a small unit about a metre and a half away from me. 

Anecdotal only, of course. Anecdotes, as Tim has reminded me, do not constitute research. Nonetheless, it seemed to be a good idea to add my experience to the pool. If anyone who happens to see this has unexpected aches or other symptoms, and spends much of their day less than a metre from a wireless router (or smartphone/tablet) then it would do no harm at all to try a few days without it - and might, just possibly, make a difference.  

The transformation of Daniel's room...

It's the end of another era, in a way.

When we moved to this house, five and a half years ago, Daniel had already left home. But it was important to us to have a bedroom for him, which we painted in a colour of his choice, and hung the curtains I'd made for his room at our previous house. Richard also put together Daniel's bed, transported out from our UK house.

After discussion with Daniel, on the other side of the world, Richard then built a desk unit underneath the bed:


.. and, by the time Daniel was ready to come back to Cyprus for a three-month furlough early in 2008, the desk was varnished, and a new set of bookshelves had appeared at the end:



Daniel used his bed again in 2010 when he had his second three-month furlough in Cyprus. But in April this year, as regular readers of these posts will be aware, Daniel married Becky. They hope to come and visit us in January some time, but will be staying in our guest flat. We talked about turning Daniel's room into a double guest room, but it wouldn't exactly be used very much since we have the entire ground floor of this house available for visitors.

We may well move our double sofa-bed (currently in my study) up there at some point. But in the meantime, Richard is taking a six-month sabbatical from work. Among other things, he plans to write his second book. And he has wanted a study of his own for some time.  So... the obvious room to use is Daniel's.

Happily, when we offered his high bed with built-in desk to our friends, their eldest daughter said she would like it. So yesterday Richard dismantled it, with Tim's help, and then remantled (if that's not a word, it should be) the bed at our friends' house.

Ikea has proved useful once more, so that Richard now has a comfortable chair for reading in, even if Tessie thinks it was bought for her benefit:


And he has constructed a kind of desk out of a couple of inexpensive Ikea tables:


The chair is his office one, borrowed for the duration. Since it's important for an office chair to be comfortable, and one can't sit in every Ikea chair for half an hour or more to test them, the best idea seemed to be to use one which he knows from experience suits him.

It looks good. I'm sure it will be useful. At the same time, it feels like another bittersweet stage in the 'empty nest' journey.