In a few months, my office is moving. This has been in the works for over a year now, as the higher ups pondered property after property, weighing the issues of being further downtown (and thus making everyone’s commute that much more ugly, with the bonus that everyone would also have to pay for parking), or finding a place near where we already are, but with the nicer, corporate feel the guys on the top were looking for. Our office is currently located in a rather eclectic little building that sits right on the river. The interior is a bit funky, with huge windows and tons of natural light and gorgeous river views, and big sloped roofs and exposed beams, and it’s definitely more casual than every other office this company has, but we’re a small, funky, eclectic group here in Sacramento and so our casual little office has worked out fairly well for us so far.

But the lease is coming up, and the word came down from on high, and so, we’re moving. Luckily, however, we’ll still be in a building that’s right on the river, with lots of windows and tons of natural light and gorgeous views, easy to get to from the freeway (we all come from different directions so this is a big must), and best of all, it is not downtown, with all the traffic and issues of paying for parking. Hurrah.

Last week we all got to troop over and check out the new space. The beauty of having such a small office is that everyone got to give their input in color schemes for carpet and paint, and how best to lay out the kitchen / copy room, and where we would prefer to have our desks set up, and so on. I am a little bit giddy because the research department (all whopping two of us) will have a room with an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, so I am going to go from never having anywhere to put things, to suddenly having more shelves than we could possibly need.

Even though we are not going to be moving until the end of January or early February, in preparation for the move the office head has been doing a rather massive cleaning sweep. Every morning this week when we come in there is more stuff piled up near the front door (the usual repository for “stuff that needs to go to the trash”, and more and more little sticky notes appear on boxes and file cabinets throughout the office, indicating what’s been sorted and cleaned out, and what still remains. This afternoon, we took the first load of stuff to the dumpster, and it is sort of terrifying to realize that even after filling up the back of a truck and carrying stacks of boxes away, the pile of stuff to get rid of doesn’t look any smaller at all. I suspect we’ll be carting loads of stuff to the dumpster on a daily basis for the rest of the week, at this rate, just as I also suspect that there is plenty more to add to the pile as well.

It’s fun, though, in a way. Maybe it’s because I moved so much as a kid (the price of being a military brat), but I enjoy this part of moving. There is something so very refreshing about purging away all the clutter that tends to accumulate when you’ve been in a place for years, and it’s only when you move that there’s ever the incentive to do it (the more you get rid of, after all, the less you have to take with you).

Anyway. On a completely different note, we are slowly settling back into the swing of home cooking. After all, what’s the point in doing all this freezer stocking if we keep forgetting to take something out to thaw? So tonight for dinner I put together a batch of Black Bean and Cheese Quesadillas while Richard washed dishes (a rapid accumulation of dishes is the definite downside to home cooking), and there is a batch of Chocolate Multigrain Muffins cooling on the kitchen counter, making the whole house smell divine.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.