More productive procrastination

I have been meaning to sort out a standing desk solution for my workspace for oh, about 7 months now. A couple of weeks ago I started reading Kelly Starrett’s book Deskbound. (Potted review: great information, bitty presentation. Thorough, but repetitive, and way too much referring to his super-cool fighter pilot clients. Essential reading for ergonomics at work, but I wish he’d got me to edit it for him.)

The book reminded me that sitting down to work will kill me so I was galvanized into action, and designed and built a standing desk solution that fits with my existing desk. There was no space to put a standalone desk, and that would take a lot more time anyway. I was most pleased with finding an apt use for the piece of walnut left over from my sister’s wedding present, and my friend Heli’s meditation stool.

Dovetails, with a mitred front, and the cork feet that the whole thing sits on.Of course I ended up adding edge banding to the boxes (oak and maple), and cutting some not-too-gappy-dovetails in both boxes,

but that was way quicker than the heavily engineered adjustability I was originally thinking of. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!

The walnut top with a groove for fitting my keyboard and trackpad.

As with my writing set up of DOOM, this set up I have now means there are no excuses left for not getting my writing done.

I set the desk up yesterday morning, and that very same day sent print-outs of the second edition of Veni Vadi Vici to the academic peer reviewers. We’ll see what they say! It’s good to have that off my plate for a bit; there’s nothing I can do with that book until I hear back from them, probably next month at the earliest.

There is a busy week coming up next week; on Tuesday, I’m flying to Helsinki with  the entire family; teaching class in the Helsinki salle on Thursday, and a seminar there on Sunday, before getting home on Wednesday morning, and driving up to Glasgow to see my brother in law, and then to Dumfries for my dad’s birthday at the weekend… so if I’m a little absent and slow to respond to things, that’s why.

All of this has also meant that there has been little forward motion on The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts (I’m thinking of titling it The HEMA Bible. What do you think? let me know in the comments here). There is not a great deal left to do on it, but I found a couple of gaps to fill, and I want it to hit the presses as a thoroughly comprehensive set of solutions to every type of HEMA problem.

Speaking of comprehensive; if you study medieval martial arts of any kind, you really should buy and read this book:

And if you study German medieval combat, you absolutely must buy and read it. It is HEMA geekery at its very finest, a serious in-depth academic study of the Fechtbuch of Lew the Jew, with a complete translation into English, and a concordance of the different manuscripts. The whole book is in German and English, so there’s really no excuse. It’s not even very expensive. Buy it. I had the pleasure of providing some language help with the English translations of the academic bits, so I may be biased, but damn, this is fine work.

And just in case you missed it; the first book from the ‘digitise the National Fencing Museum's library' project is ready, and yours for free.