When I became pregnant (5 years ago!), I knew that I didn’t want to work full-time. However, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work part-time or just quit. I decided to ask if I could start working from home and go down to 20 hrs/week. My manager is amazing and made this happen. Since then, I have been working 20 hrs/week from home and my employer has been very understanding about letting me work flexible hours.

However, in 2014 we’re planning to migrate to a new ILS¹ This is going to be a BIG DEAL. These last couple of years have been maintenance years so I haven’t been overwhelmed trying to get all essential tasks done during my official work hours. However, 20 hrs/week is not going to be enough time to navigate a migration. So, started in January, I’ll be increasing my work time to 32 hrs/week²³. My tentative plan is to stop working Sunday mornings and instead work a straight Monday-Friday schedule. I’m hoping to get up at 6am and work a couple of hours before taking a break to drop Calvin off at PreK/daycare. Then continue working the rest of my hours before picking him up.

Unfortunately, 6am is currently when I try to get up and exercise. Since Calvin has been born I’ve only been exercising sporadically. I’ll just have figured out how to exercise and something, usually Calvin’s routine, changes and I have to figure out where to gouge out time again⁴. It’s not a good idea for me to get no exercise because I like food way too much.

I’ve been rolling this quandary in my head for several months now trying to figure out options. Gradually, I started wondering if a treadmill desk might be the answer. I’ve seen all sorts of articles about the benefits of standing desks and treadmill desks as well as a couple concerns. Up to this point, I’ve been a bit dubious. I’ve been fortunate in that at the moment I have no problems typing at a regular desk⁵. So, there hasn’t been a great need for me to investigate any variation of standing desks.

As I said, the idea of a treadmill desk was rolling in the back of my head. Then, we got to the part in our ILS process where I needed to starting reading the manuals of our contenders. I love reading manuals, you find out such useful things. However, even I have trouble staying awake reading manuals for hours on end while sitting down. So, I loaded them on my ipad and started pacing down stairs in the living room. It mostly worked but also made me consider the idea of the treadmill desk more seriously.

I know Craigslist always has someone listing a treadmill. I decided it would make sense to start looking for one now rather than in January when people, apocryphally anyway, decide to lose their December weight gain. I found several good candidates, one that was even only $25. However, the problem is we don’t have a car big enough to cart a treadmill home. So, eventually I decided to go and buy a cheap new treadmill. I found a ProForm 6.0 RT Treadmill on sale for $400 at Sports Authority. I bought it and was thankful to see that in the original box, it was able to fit in Motoko for me to cart home. Let’s be clear, this is a cheap treadmill. It’s a little bit on the quirky side but I bought it as a proof of concept. When I actually increase my hours and start making more money, I might end up upgrading.

I put it down in the basement because we don’t have room anywhere else. I wanted it by the window for the natural light. In order to make it fit, I had to move the bed, one of the bookcases, and the loveseat sectional. The pictures, that use to be centered above the bed, are now off-kilter and I’m not sure if it would look strange to re-center them above the bed or not.

So, I had the treadmill, but I still needed someway to use my laptop. I looked at several options. The cheapest option was SurfShelf. However, I’m not particularly tall and I was worried that it wouldn’t be adjustable enough for my needs. There are very nice looking treadmill desks or even fancier treadmill/desk combos but I was looking for a very cheap proof of concept option. I had no idea if I could work while walking and didn’t want to waste tons of money if it didn’t work out for me.

So, this is what I ended up with.

Yes, the picture lighting is very bad. I don’t have good options in the basement.

I bought a 48″ shelving board from Home Depot (under $10) and then used existing metal shelving that use to be in Calvin’s room. We had removed it from Calvin’s room because it was not sturdy enough to handle Calvin climbing on it. However, it seems relatively stable for the purposes of a prototype treadmill desk.

Last Thursday I worked at my treadmill desk for a couple of hours and everything seemed fine. Friday, I got up at 6am and worked an hour and afterwards my left arm was aching. My first guess was I had the laptop set at the wrong height which was doing bad things to my left arm. Though, I found it a bit confusing it was only my left arm. I decided not to work on the treadmill any further until Jaeger could watch what I was doing and see if the angles were all wrong.

On Sunday, Jaeger watched me typing and told me he thought the desk was too low, I nededed to raise it. After looking at a couple of free options around the house, I discovered the best height was achieved by sticking The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion on one end and the corresponding King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking on the other. Yes, it’s kludgy but it works for now. However, other than double checking the height was good, I didn’t work at the desk because I wanted to give my arm time to recover.

Monday I went up to Greeley to pick up a printer for work. I had just been using our personal printer but given the amount of paperwork I’m going to have to go through for the ILS migration, I decided I should actually get a printer from work so I wasn’t wasting our personal toner. Calvin has no preschool for the entire week so I loaded up the iPad with storybook movies and carted him up to Greeley. Many of my co-workers at the district support building had seen Calvin when he was a newborn but not recently so they oohed and ahhed. Calvin was not excited by all this attention so I ended up carrying him in my left arm all around the building for about an hour. He was very grateful when I decided I had done enough socializing and left with a Laserjet 3600 DN in my car.

It fits, really.

Tuesday I got up at 6am with the hope of getting as much work as possible done before Calvin woke up. However, I had shooting pains in my arm the moment I started typing. I was bemused. My arm hadn’t been nearly this bad Friday morning and I hadn’t tried working while walking since then. Then, I realized the problem wasn’t the treadmill, it was carrying Calvin. Apparently carrying a 35+ lb child in one arm is a bad idea. I’ve been carrying him like this for the past 4 years so his weight just gradually increased and, until now, I haven’t had a huge problem with it. However, it’s probably time he learn to walk. So far, Calvin hasn’t been impressed with my refusal to carrying him various places, such as when we go in to the grocery store.

My arm settled down by Tuesday afternoon and I was able to work about 3 hours while walking both today and yesterday. I’ve settled on a 2 mph walking pace. It’s pretty slow but I can do it without thinking. Plus, 2 mph/hr for 2-3 hours is still a reasonable amount of exercise, better than sitting anyway. 3 mph will probably be doable once I get more use to it and/or get a better desk.

Jaeger has been wanting room in the upstairs study. Technically it’s “the study” but it kind of migrated to being “my study” because I used it significantly more than he did. However, he was getting annoyed at the amount of clutter I have which left him no room for his late-night India conference calls. So, I’ve decided to migrate my working desk downstairs completely. I’ve setup the little cubicle desk to be my workplace for the hours I don’t walk while working. I’m also hoping that having my sitting desk so close to the treadmill will make it easy to go back and forth.

I also decided that if I was going to be next to the window well so much, I really should spiff it up a bit. So, it’s been weeded and new weed barrier and mulch have been put down. In addition, I splurged for some hanging baskets to add a little color. One day in and they haven’t died yet!

What I have now is definitely kludgy. At a minimum, I’ll probably upgrade to a real desk once I start working 32 hrs/week. I probably will also want to do something about the screen. Right now I have to look down, instead of straight ahead, to type and that’s not the best position. I could probably mount/dock the laptop in front of the treadmill and then use a wireless mouse/keyboard at the desk itself. It’s a work in progress.

While Jaeger was gone with Calvin to NYC Anna, my kitchen computer, started rebooting randomly. The first couple times I thought it was coincidence. Then it started doing it multiple times per day.

Given that Anna is located in the kitchen next to my mixer, I thought it was possible she was just clogged up with cat hair, flour, and grease. So once Jaeger returned he took her apart. There was definitely dust but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I expected. Unfortunately, that left the most likely problem as the hard drive. I did some testing and verified that the hard drive was beginning to fail.

I briefly contemplated whether or not it made sense to just replace Anna. At this point, I think tablets are to the point where they’d meet most of my kitchen computer needs. Unfortunately, that’d leave me without a handy Windows computer to sync my iPod and iPad¹. Weighing the pros and cons I decided it was probably best to just replace the hard drive and hope the rest of her lasts until we move overseas².

I decided fairly quickly that I wanted an SSD. I figured the fewer moving parts the better. After a couple weeks of lazy researching, I decided to get a Samsung 500 GB SSD. I ordered from Amazon because I currently have a trial prime membership³ and I could get it delivered in two business days. Jaeger left for San Diego Monday evening but handed over an external hard drive I could use to back up the important parts of Anna.

Tuesday my shiny new SSD arrived. I was ready to have my computer back and already had everything taken apart by the time UPS showed up. Calvin was really excited because I didn’t want him anywhere near the disassembled computer so he got to watch TV. I knew it would be small but I didn’t visualize how small it would be. The SSD is on the bottom right, next to my iPhone. The original drive is in the upper left corner.

I had also purchased a 3.5″ to 2.5″ converter bay and merrily set to screwing everything together. Then I realized I had a problem. Anna’s hard drive cable was just long enough to hook into the large older hard drive. The new drive, when screwed into it’s bay, was about an inch further away. The cable could not reach. I sat and stared at the cable and the hard drive and the converter bay. I reconfigured things multiple times knowing that it was no good but hoping I could come up with a kludge that would work. No luck.

So, I started looking around for a physical store that would carry a 22 pin SATA power and data cable extension. Apparently they don’t exist. I was under this naive belief that just because I didn’t go out and buy hard drive cables at physical stores every day didn’t mean they weren’t available. I looked on all the local stores’ websites without success. Then I called Best Buy hoping it was one of those small items they just didn’t bother to list. The sales associate I talked to didn’t seem particularly well versed in cables. He kept writing down that I wanted a 22 inch cable, rather than a 22 pin cable. In the end, he confirmed they didn’t have it. The next store I called I kept it simple and asked if they carried hard drive cables. The answer was no. So, I went back to Amazon and ordered a 12″ extension cable. I was nervous that 12″ would be too much but there weren’t a lot of other options. It arrived on Thursday.

Nowhere near as cocky as I had been Tuesday, I started trying to put things together again. The converter bay I bought was made so you could put two SSDs in, if desired. Originally, I had put my SSD in the lower position. However, the two ends of the cable were too close together and I couldn’t make it fit. I changed the SSD to the upper position and tried again. It still didn’t really fit but it was close enough that I hoped it would work.

In the picture above you can see how little room I had to work with. The original hard drive cable comes out underneath where the optical drive bay is and there’s no where except on top of the optical drive bay for the excess extension cable to go. It was a tight fit and I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to get the back cover on. Nor was I convinced the connections would be good enough it would all actually work. I’m not sure if you can tell from the picture but the cable is entering the SSD at a slight angle. When I originally decided to buy an all-in-one computer I hadn’t been thinking of scenarios like this . . .

Anyway, I crammed everything in, crammed the back cover on and held it down while I screwed everything back together. To my surprise, and relief, the computer did turn on. Even better, the BIOS saw the drive and the Windows DVD seemed perfectly happy to install to it.

I decided to do a clean install instead of trying to migrate my data directly. My old drive was only 320 GB so size wasn’t a problem but Anna had never had a clean Windows install. I had gotten rid of most of the gunk Windows computers ship with but she’d been three years with the same install and I figured it would be a good idea to start from scratch.

Once I had the cover back on, everything else went really, really well. All her old programs appear to have transferred over fine and I think I’ve got all my files over also (though I keep thinking I must be missing something . . . ). She obviously is running a lot faster at the moment. She’s slow for an SSD, I think, but still much faster than she was⁴.

Anyway, hopefully Anna stops being so dramatic and can now go back to being my convenient kitchen computer again.