Last Saturday, I decided to tear the whole mess apart, with the hopes that I could reassemble it into a more orderly situation. This is how it looked in the beginning:

The first thing I did was take the turntable off of the desk and move it onto this shelf in the bedroom.

For the first time since we moved to California, the turntable is actually connected to the stereo. Maybe it’ll get some regular use again.

That left things looking kinda like this:

(Yeah, that’s dust on top of the turntable in the lower, right-hand side of the photo, before it was moved.)

Here’s what the area around my computer monitor/keyboard looked like:

I cleared more stuff from the desk, discarding papers and other things that were no longer needed, and filing some other papers into a filing cabinet. The situation was showing some improvement:

(A closer look at the Critter Parade, as Jen calls it:)

I eventually got the idea to push the cassette deck back and place my Line 6 POD XT Live effects processor in front of it. (This’ll make it easier to access the POD XT for recording projects. Before, it was under the desk. Not a very convenient location.)

Next up was to unbox and set up my new Alesis audio monitors:

Once the audio monitors were in place, it was time to get everything connected. I tried to get things as organized as possible. But when there are so many cords and cables, there’s no perfect solution. The only rule I had was to try and keep power cords, data cables and audio cables separated from each other. You can see here how I pinned the black network cable and the black telephone-line cable to the wall to try and keep them free from the mass of power cords coming down from the desk:

Overall, the plan worked out OK. (I forgot to take an “after” picture of the back of the desk, but anything would be an improvement on this:)

After about eight hours (!) worth of work, the desk now looks like this:

(Yeah, I still had some dusting to do after the above photos were taken.) Overall, things are much more harmonious in the desk area. I hope I’m able to keep it this way for awhile. I’m not looking forward to a repeat of Operation Desk Restore.

(Some more photos are available here.)