Published: November 24, 2025 at 04:30 PM

Tags: blog, personal, organization, projects, gospel, tech, writing

Somewhere under a stack of books, loose notes, and old computer parts, I own a desk. I haven’t seen much of it lately, but I’m fairly sure it’s still there.

Most of my day-to-day work happens at the desk in my bedroom where my desktop and TV live, while the so-called “office” has slowly turned into a storage room with aspirations. Over time it became the place where I put things “for now,” which, as it turns out, is a very effective way to lose them for a year or two. This week I will be trying to undo some of that.

The goal is simple: make the office usable again, not just as a walk-in closet for paper and plastic bins. There are piles of books I haven’t opened yet, notes I haven’t re-read, and random bits of hardware that “might be useful someday.” None of it is terrible on its own, but stacked together it becomes a wall between me and actually doing anything in that room.

Once I can see the desktop again, the plan is to move the laptop and Raspberry Pi in there, the machines that don’t need to be on all the time, but that I’d still like to have set up and ready. Right now, any time I want to use them I have to dig them out, find cables, clear a spot… and half the time I talk myself out of it before I even get started. If I can walk into the office, sit down, and just open the lid or power on the Pi, that alone should nudge a few projects forward.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Alongside the cleaning, I’m back at the Accounting book work. “Comfortable” might not be quite the right word for how I feel about that job now, but I’m at least settled into it. I know the routine, I understand the software, and I’m no longer panicked every time I see a new stack of receipts. The danger now is the opposite: it’s easy to rush. I don’t ever want to drag the work out, it’s his business, not my personal hobby, but I also don’t want to treat it carelessly. There’s a line between being efficient and being sloppy, and I have to keep an eye on it.

At some point I also need to circle back to something he mentioned before: someone else might be looking to hire a person to do the same sort of work I’m doing for him now. I should really follow up on that instead of filing it away in the “someday” part of my brain with everything else.

Then there are the websites. Both this personal site and the Gospel site have been moving forward slower than they should be. That one’s on me. I get a burst of energy, make plans, sketch out structures and posts… and then I slack off, let the days slip by, and suddenly it has been a month since anything changed. I want to sit down and really get at it again.

One of the changes I’ve been thinking about is splitting the history-related content off my main site and giving it its own little corner of the web. The more I dig into local and Island history, the more I realize it deserves its own space instead of being squeezed in between tech notes and personal updates.

So, add “reorganize the websites” to the growing list. And because what I obviously need in life is another project, before this week is over I want to start properly photographing Scott MacLeod’s Tabernacle items for his ministry series.

The plan is to take a careful set of photos of each item and then experiment with some new software, Meshroom, to see if I can build 3D, rotatable views of the pieces. In theory, that would let someone visit the site and move the items around on screen, almost like they were walking around the display tables.

In practice… we’ll see. It might work beautifully, or it might convince me that 2D photos are perfectly fine after all. Either way, it feels worth trying. If nothing else, it will force me to improve my photography a bit.

Then there’s the poetry.

For years I’ve had poems scattered across notebooks, old files, and forgotten folders. I keep saying I’m going to gather them up and finally put them into a proper collection, something I can release as a digital edition and maybe even a print-on-demand book. Realistically, I might be the only one who ever buys a copy, but that’s fine. There’s a certain satisfaction in simply being able to say, “I did it. I finished something.” That alone would make it worthwhile. This project doesn’t have the same urgency as the bookkeeping or the websites, but it’s sitting quietly in the background, tapping me on the shoulder every so often.

Late Nights and Quiet Searching

As I type this, it’s late again. It should not surprise anyone that I’m still awake when I ought to be asleep; that seems to be my default setting these days.

Scott’s Tabernacle ministry is continuing Tuesday to Friday this week and then wrapping up. The messages so far have been rich, lots to take in, both mentally and spiritually. In a way, they’ve stirred up a fresh need in me to dig into some personal spiritual things that I’ve maybe left sitting in the corner, the same way I’ve left my office piled high with boxes.

The more I listen, the more I realize that tidying up my rooms and reorganizing my projects is only part of the work. There’s a heart-level “decluttering” that needs attention too, priorities, habits, distractions, things I cling to that don’t really matter.

It’s a lot. But little by little, with His help, the mess does start to shift.