Updated: March 18, 2013 6:28AM

Almost every day now, when I have a few spare minutes at work, I discard some more stuff that isn’t going to go with me as I prepare to leave our office on Commons Drive in Aurora.

As you probably noticed toward the end of last year, Sun-Times Media LLC, our parent company, announced that by the end of the first quarter it will have closed all the suburban offices of its print and Internet publications and consolidated most of the various newspaper staffs at its downtown Chicago office.

However, those of us who report news or write columns will be in the cities they cover and work out of their homes, the coffee shops, the library or wherever they can flip open a laptop and write.

I live in Naperville and I’ve written columns primarily about Naperville for almost 40 years now, so much of the time I’ll be out in the community — plunking myself down frequently at a table at the Lantern, in one of the library buildings, the coffee shop area at Barnes & Noble, or wherever there is an Internet connection.

So when the weather turns better if you happen across a grizzled geezer drinking coffee and tapping away at a laptop on a Riverwalk bench, stop and say hello.

One of the downsides of working in an office all these years is that I’ve never been able to get out of it as often as I’d like, so given a chance to spend more time in my city has a lot of appeal to me.

To be sure, I will miss the socialization part of the workplace — and especially the great baked goods that reporter Susan Carlman brings to the office, though not nearly as often as I wish she would.

The only thing readers should notice after the move is that that our writers, and certainly myself, will be more visible in Naperville.

The move itself is the hardest part for a pack rat like me.

So far, I’ve ditched a great big stack of newspapers dating back to last autumn, when I cleaned it out because it threatened to fall over on me.

Before I’m done, old telephone books, governmental reports, unsolicited magazines from fringe groups, and a lot of old notebooks will have all hit the circular filing bin.

In my case, it is still true that one of the most useful things for a newspaper guy is a big wastepaper basket. From now until I show up in downtown Naperville with a laptop looking for a place to light, I’ll be proving that point.

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