Eras

This is the end of an era. 

I'm typing this from my desktop PC, a pretty dusty Win7 box that I think I clucked down next to my desk sometime in 2012. As I type, I'm transferring pictures and files off of it, which is the first step in the process to clean it up and send it to the recycler. 

The space that my PC desk sits in will soon become my permanent hobby area.  We don't have a basement, and I've been living in a "temp" space on the dining room table.  I put quotes around "temp" because the mess has been there pretty consistently over the past few years.  Technically it all collapses into some rubbermaid bins and Amazon boxes, but realistically it's a daily presence and a nuisance. 

Times change. Interests change. For the past couple decades, I've been a pretty avid PC gamer and MMO player.  I'm not sure when that stopped being true, but it has.  Slowly, I drifted away - driven by my own physical frailty (a shoulder that is trying to freeze and hates long hours on the PC).  I also found a desire to be more visible and "do more" with the time that I have here on the planet.  (I'm not sure how painting tiny army men qualifies for that, but let me have this moment). 

Anyway, the past couple of years, this gaming rig has stopped being the place where I spent my downtime, and instead become the place where I do my taxes, or listen to music when I'm working from home.  And yet I clung to it and avoided the idea that I needed to reclaim the space.

We've been at this address just about 10 years now.  The place where my PC is now is where my PC was when we moved in.  I've never not called it "the computer room."  As I'm sifting through things here, I can't help but feel a little nostalgic.  Games the way they used to be; screenshots of guild greatness in WoW, shenanigans in EVE, heck the desktop background is still set to my EVE Corp (guild) logo that I adapted from a real world logo in 2004 (modernized a few times, but ... originating 15 years ago).

But it's time.  Time to move on, time to evolve, time to accept what has already been true for awhile.  I have some work to do before the machine is turned off for the final time, but this might be the last meaningful thing that I type from it. 

Let's do this.