It feels like there are a million different things to do....but I guess that's just how it is sometimes.

My main accomplishment today was doing a clean of my computer, desk, and cabling.  Well, I vacuumed the stairs and bathroom too, but that was secondary...

I gave my GPU some new thermal paste (overdue...I'm honestly not sure if I even did it the last time I opened it up) as well as got a whole bunch of dust out of it, which seems to have helped the temps on it.  I also just tidied up my desktop tower in general, but by far the biggest thing I did was to clear up my desk and try to organize all of my computer cabling.

I seem to be spending a lot of time doing online shopping (for myself...) recently, but honestly, I'm all here for it.  First it was mechanical keyboard stuff, then kitchen organization supplies, now desk products, and then...back to keyboard stuff xD.  But anyways, I bought a new monitor stand for myself, because the ergo stand that came with my LG Dualup didn't actually fit with my desk.  I had McGyver'ed an ugly workable solution, but found that I could just get a relatively inexpensive Amazon basics monitor arm and it both accomodates my desk and works just fine.  I was a little disappointed because a review mentioned being able to remove/disassemble the horizontal arm, and while I found how to do that, the bolts that I needed to remove to do so would NOT budge at all, so I gave up and just left the arm on, even though it's debatable whether I need it.  I guess it doesn't necessarily =hurt=, and if anything it makes the center of the desk feel more open to have the monitor arm off to the side instead of just being a post, so in the end I guess all's well that ends well.

The other big change I did was get all of the cables and lights off of my desk.  I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with my cotton ball and string lights yet (?), but having the cabling for all of that stuff on my desk was getting to be too much.  My big power brick (actually a power conditioner...) also used to be on top of the desk, which was sensible enough given that all the plugs are on the backside, but it was just adding to the clutter.

I was a bit conflicted on exactly where to put the power brick, but decided to just get some cable management supplies and figure it out later.  The thing is, I don't actually =need= my cables to be ultra-neat because I have desk cabinets across the entire width of my desk -- the tower itself and all of the cabling is behind all that, and inaccessible unless you move the cabinets.  Because of that I decided not to go for any sort of more expensive or heavyweight cable management solution like a power strip "bay" that you need to adhesive or drill onto the bottom of your desk.  Instead I just got a kit of cable wraps and various things to hopefully make some order out of everything.

I'm quite pleased by how it turned out!  I tried to get rid of some things that I didn't need (there was an extra SSD in my desktop that really had no business still being plugged in...plus a bunch of stuff from when I set up switching my monitor seamlessly from an OSX clamshell laptop to the windows desktop...and then never actually used that functionality), and in general just make sense of the cabling a lot more.  Again, it didn't really matter too much visibly, but it'll make my life so, so much easier whenever I need to do any work back there (plus it just makes me feel good inside).

The power brick just ended up on the floor...which is fine.  Maybe not 100% ideal since it's literally right by the heater vent, but eh; I keep that vent mostly shut and I'm sure it'll be fine....=P

Really though, I didn't have too many other great options.  I could have tried to put the power brick on top of the cabinets, tucked out of view underneath the desk, which would have really hid everything, but it would have been really awkward to cram all the cabling in that cramped space, plus if I ever needed to adjust anything or pull out one of the cabinets to get in there, it would be a huge headache.

Honestly the two biggest things that I did were just use cable ties (I used the velcro ones, but honestly you could have used zip ties in a pinch) to aggressively bundle extra cable lengths so it didn't just spaghetti everywhere, and then used big cable sleeves to group pairs or trios of cables together.  It's just nicer to have a single sleeve for bringing down the monitor power + video input together, for example, and then it can just split near the bottom wherever it makes sense to.

So that's all done for now!  There's still a lot of stuff to do in my room, though.  I have my new lights coming in soon (tomorrow?) hopefully, so I'll have to experiment with where to put those (might need to order an extension cable...), and then honestly I have to go through all of my drawers and boxes and see what makes sense to just get rid of and how I can reorganize my stuff.  There's actually still one or two cabinets in the kitchen that need organizing too, as well as a hallway cabinet, but eh.  One thing at a time.

Like I said, there's a million other things, but we can only do so much at once.  I'm quite due for another Rhythm Quest update, so I'll need to get to that, but I'm also writing my Christmas letters -- only a few more to go, thankfully.  And I've still got my monthly pixel art to take care of.

It's funny, I wrote today in one of my letters about learning a life lesson of needing to be able to sacrifice some things to make room for others.  The idea that you can't just do everything all the time.  Sometimes you need to let one thing go, even if it's just for a day, or a week.  You just do what you can, and try to pace yourself.  Sometimes you work on one thing, sometimes you work on another thing.  Today I wrote this blog post.  Tomorrow it'll be something different.  I'll try to either do Rhythm Quest or drawing tomorrow, at least one of those two things should get taken care of.  Heh, this is reminding me of how I heard from HealthyGamerGG once that there was research that was done on how successful students aren't the ones who =want= to do well on tests the most, nor the ones who most =need= to do well on the tests, but rather, it was the students who focused on scheduling how they would prepare for the tests.  Deciding in advance what they needed to do.  I guess I feel like that sometimes, too.