I guess one of the okay things about living safe and sound at home during a pandemic is that various projects that we have put off for a variety of months and years are occasionally finally getting done.
Will incubated eggs like she wanted to last summer but didn't get around to doing before it got cold (I bought her this incubator for her birthday last year). I made the Christmas tree topper whose pattern I printed out probably this time last year. I'm almost finished with the quilt that I wanted to give to my kid last winter. Hell, I even just finished up two months of physical therapy to fix the shoulder that I busted almost exactly a year ago to this day!
One of the reasons why my shoulder got so bad (other than, you know, me ignoring my chronic pain...), suggested one of my physical therapists, was likely my professed habit, as I told them, of "spending most of my days hunched like a gremlin over either a keyboard or a sewing machine." I feel like over the course of my many visits, at one time or other every single physical therapist in the practice gently suggested to me that, you know, I NOT do that.
So now I spend some of that time sitting on a yoga ball instead, or standing with my laptop propped up on a big cushion--there's really not a great way to make a laptop ergonomically correct, it turns out, since the screen and the keyboard are so compressed together.
But the need to get some variety into my sedentary occupations reminded me that I LOVE vibing on my treadmill, and I have wanted a treadmill desk for probably a decade (Noel, when did you trade me your old treadmill for my old DVD player? Was that a whole decade ago?).
And wouldn't you know it, but like many of my most procrastinated-against projects, my brand-new DIY treadmill desk took probably five minutes to make, maybe twenty if you count the time it took to pick out the materials in the big-box hardware store (I'm not going to count the drive there and back as time spent on the project, because we were there buying stuff for probably fourteen different projects, and also I was a little tipsy so I bought some plants I didn't need, too).
Matt and I bought one finished board longer than my treadmill is wide but about as wide as the treadmill's horizontal handrails are long. We also bought two bungee cords the same length as the board.
Our sophisticated mounting system is to lay the board across the handrails and stretch the bungee cords underneath it, bungeeing it to the handrails and hooking the ends over the short ends of the board. Matt was all prepared to do more stuff to make it sturdy, but that's all it took! It's totally sturdy!
As I type this I'm trundling along at a happy 1 mph, my posture for sure not perfect (shoulders BACK, Julie!!!) but also for sure not hunched forward and slumped over in a way that makes the state of my scapulas absolutely shocking for a physical therapist to witness. It feels really nice to get some restless energy out when I've got a lot of writing to be going on with, and the desk is big enough that I can make myself a whole magpie's nest on top of it with all my stuff.
It's a DIY win! I kind of even have the urge to go flip through all my planners from the past decade and find the one where I wrote "DIY treadmill desk" in some random to-do list next to some random week...
...AND CROSS IT OFF!!!!!!!
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