It’s not house-related, but I’m taking a stand

So I sit at a desk all day. Or most of the day, anyway. I go on walks a lot. Sometimes just in a loop around the office, sometimes around the block. But otherwise, I’m sitting. After some recurring pain in my hands and wrists and arms awhile back, I got one of those fancy broken keyboard split in half, which seemed to do the trick.

For a few months anyway. Starting a couple weeks ago, it started back again out of the blue. My arms would hurt so bad when I came home, I couldn’t even think about using my laptop at home at night. I’d been wanting to have a standing desk for awhile — and had even tried out various boxes and contraptions placed up on my desk for a bit, but with the broken keyboard and separate monitor in the mix, it wasn’t ideal. I didn’t want to just stand with my laptop, since the laptop keyboard was part of the problem. And I wanted the flexibility to sit OR stand — not be roped into just standing all day long. Those desks and move up and down are really expensive and I was unlikely to get one.

I decided to see if my company would get me a mount for my monitor I could put on the wall, so I could move it up or down depending on whether I was standing or sitting, and I told them that I’d build an add-on desk for myself.

So last night, while working on the new Murphy Bed for the guestroom (“The what???” More to come on that soon, I promise!), I used some of the leftover plywood to crank out a quick small desk that was big enough to hold my oversized broken keyboard and a mouse. Light enough that I could easily pick it up and down off the desk, but sturdy enough for banging on a keyboard on top of it or writing, etc.

Since it was just a few cuts, I banged it out pretty quick last night. And then I primed it and painted it while watching the DC United game against (almost OH SO VERY METRO) New York last night.

With it all ready after drying overnight, this morning I did what any enterprising bike commuter would do. I started strapping it to the rack on the back of my bike. Rachel called down to me, “Are you taking it to the office already? Are you driving in today?”

“Of course not! I’m strapping it to my bike!”

“That seems like a pretty bad idea.”

“This is exactly the sort of thing the good Lord invented bungee cords for,” I told her.

“Look up and smile!”

“What for???? ….

“Oh.”

(And for the record, I have no idea why there’s a bottle of Pepto there on the table. Weird.)

All jokes aside, it works great so far, though I’m really just making do with a laptop on it and not using my fancy keyboard there under the stand, since my monitor is stuck in the “sitting” position behind the desk.

But even just standing with the the laptop, my arms and wrists feel ten times better. No pain whatsoever. And somehow, I feel more focused and less distracted standing up. As I told my officemate this morning, the nice thing about standing all day, is that now when I take a break, I get to sit on my butt for 5 minutes in our nice easy chair!

The other bonus is that you can dance to the music on your headphones while you’re standing. Like this guy who clearly sees the bennies of a StandingDeskDanceParty.com

But maybe not so much like this kid. Not at work anyway. When I get home.