elbow room

It's irritating when in a spacious house with large windows opposite which there are no light-blocking blocks of flats when the many people around of whom photographs might be taken start either concealing their face or waving their arms about when a camera is pointed at them. I'm not desperately in need of more photographs of parents but I'll definitely need some of sister + fiancé when they arrive on Thursday. I've only met him once before and slightly struggled to find a picture of him when I was making my face-picture gift-tags last week as only one of the few pictures of him + sister was usable by the time it was cropped down to face-size. I'll also have to provide a few reasonable face-pictures to stick amongst the various fambly-pictures on the walls.

Although we've not been down here for a year little seems to have changed except for the slight adjustments to the bookcases which have lined the walls of the room above the garage with the computer in for the past twenty years. When combined with the relatively gigantic desk (salvaged from somewhere my dad used to work) it left very little space for the boxes and piles of crap and the huge industrial-sized metal filing cabinet which also inhabited the room, especially when enough space had to be left for the door to swing the wrong way into the room rather than against the wall, where it would have blocked access to the light switch. With the filing cabinet gone and the shelves shifted to another room the walls are now mostly visible though there are still a few boxes around the edges, now augmented by all my stuff which won't fit into the small gap around the edge of the bed in my room, large enough for me as a youth when there was only a single bed in there but too small for the futon-thing which my parents installed within a year of my moving out even though my sister's room had been maintained as she'd left it. I'd hoped that by putting all my stuff in there and leaving my amp at the bottom of the stairs (to be stuck in the loft at some later date) that a decent separation between amp and the various external hard drives in the bag I'd left in the study would be maintained, so was mildly disturbed to discover the amp underneath the desk, mere yards from the external hard drives. Considering that it as my dad who instilled in me my fear of putting magnetic storage media anywhere near sources of magnetic fields he should perhaps have spotted this error, though luckily nothing seems to have been harmed this time. I was going to leave the off-site backup drive in the loft somewhere but might change it to a bookshelf somewhere so that there's no chance of a loft-rearrangement resulting in any unfortunate data-wiping juxtapositions.