Rach's Diary - Desks, desks and more desks

If you keep up to date with my blogs you will know that I've been on the move recently. Don't panic! I'm not leaving the North West, or even Manchester, but St Peter's House where I am based is doing some building work and it has been easier to work away from there. Something I've realised is that I don't like working from home. Being an extrovert, it's tricky to do a whole day by myself so I've found other places to work.

I started last week at my parents' house, where I get free coffee delivered to my desk (technically their dining room table!) and have been in a nice quiet place to be able to skype with both the SCM team in Birmingham for our weekly team meeting, and also one of the Christian Aid North West team who wasn't in the office when I went to visit in June.

Back at my own home, while waiting for a parcel to arrive between 7am and 7pm on Thursday I have been working on "A Light for All" our next event in the North West in November. I also did some Link Church chasing and am excited to add St Paul's Scotforth to the Team North West Link Churches!

This Monday I spent my morning in Ikea (other furniture based cafés are available). Cheap breakfast, free coffee, a plug socket and WIFI. I got back up to date with emails and wrote articles for the Grassroots North West newsletter ready for September. Then a bus ride later I was back home to do some planning for the next few months. If you have something exciting going on in the North West between September and December (or beyond) and want me to join you please get in touch.

This whole working from home has really impacted my train count. My July final total is 51 trains, 3 Buses and 4 trams, with the grand train total for 11 months reaching 652.

August however started with 4 trains to get me to the Birmingham office which had no desks left when I got there. You may know that SCM is growing in lots of ways at the moment and that also means we need more desks in the office. In the past when I've worked from there I've hot desked around everyone else's depending on who wasn't in, or if all seven of us were in the office I've used a laptop on the meeting table. Not anymore! I spent most of Tuesday putting drawer sets together and by the end of the day we had eight desks set up. Wednesday started with me under desks plugging in the computers, and then sorting through boxes of stuff. The most exciting thing is that I now have a desk of my own (for the time being anyway) - now just to decide what to store in all those drawers!

That gets us back to today, where I'm sat in my living room, actually working from home. Today is a day of making sure everything is sorted before I go on leave tomorrow for a couple of weeks. Thank you for joining me on this journey all year. After my leave I'm looking forward to being part of the SCM presence at Greenbelt, and most likely my next diary blog will be after that! See you then.

Rach