I didn’t make it all the way home.
My Foxborough meeting let out at 2:00. I headed North toward home, but the traffic was building up. I have a 3:00 conference call I need to attend and I was going to be super late for it. I gave up on my dream of working from home for the last couple of hours of the day and pulled into my regular office. I am going to make the 3:00, which is good, but I am still in the office, which is not as good.
Fail. Oh well.
Tuesday in the office? Check.
Wednesday in the office? Check.
Thursday in the office? Still to come.
I drove the 70+ miles to Foxborough this morning. I attended a couple of meetings, one of which was in person and the whole reason I made the commute. When it was over I packed up my stuff and drove home and finished the day here. Literally right here at this desk that I am sitting at as I type this masterpiece of a blog post right now.
Tomorrow might be different. The in person meeting I am driving the 70+ miles for runs from 12-2:00. Is that too late in the day for me to drive a little more than an hour to work from home for the last couple of hours of the day? I’m definitely not staying in Foxborough, but I could drive to my actual office building in Westwood and finish the day there. I don’t want to do that, but from a self guilt stand point that might be the way to go. I will see if I can bring myself to run the two options (home or Westwood) past my boss and see if he even cares which choice I make.
All of this means that I have one more day this week where I have to get up extremely early so that I can get my morning exercise in before I leave, and still leave early enough to drive the hour and a half it takes to get to where I need to be. It is stressing me out big time, but at least I should be back to one day in the office each week for the next few months. Come March though… mandatory two days. Shit.
Okay then, it’s 8:00pm. I finished dinner about half an hour ago. I am still feeling pretty full in my little tiny faux stomach gastric bypassed pouch. Today is supposed to be national ice cream day. I can’t eat real ice cream anymore, but I have a sugar free ice cream-esque thing in the freezer that I can have. That will allow me to get in on the ice creamy celebration, and it also has five grams of protein! Bonus!
I think I’ll watch an episode of Deep Space Nine and then see if I am hungry enough for a snack. I probably will be. What I should do is try to write some music, but I don’t think I have it in me tonight. It was a long day in what is amounting to a very long week.
I’ll survive… somehow… day by day.
This is more a reminder to myself than anything else.
My company’s hybrid work schedule currently has us working in the office once a week, and working from home four days a week. It’s going to change to two days in the office in March, but that is not relevant today.
Part of the agreement is that if you have something important going on, like a meeting or a training or something, that requires you to be in person, then you may have to be in the office more than once for that week. That’s happening to me this week. I have a meeting tomorrow that requires me to be in the office for the full day. I have another meeting on Wednesday that will require me to be in the office at least half of the day, and I have still another meeting and a training on Thursday that will require me to be in for at least half of that day too.
The thing is… after losing 200 pounds in the last year and a half I have needed to rebuild my wardrobe and… well… I only own two work-appropriate collared shirts. Two shirts… three days… This post is a reminder to myself that I need to do laundry as soon as I get home from work tomorrow, or else I won’t have a shirt to wear on Thursday. I hang dry all of my shirts now so that they won’t shrink, and it usually takes a full day to completely dry. So I need to have tomorrow’s shirt hanging before I go to sleep tomorrow so that it will be thoroughly dry before I leave for work on Thursday.
Damn it. I suppose I could just go buy a third shirt… but I don’t wanna.
Just call me spoiled rotten, I guess.
I have a new workspace for telecommuting. I had a desk in the cellar that had a work computer section and a personal computer section. When I took my photo a day pic at lunch time or whatever, I could plug my Nikon Z5 into my personal computer, a MacBook Pro, and pull the RAW file into Apple Photos, convert it to a PNG, and then upload it to Flickr.
On the new desk, I don’t have the Mac next to me. It’s just Windows. That means I don’t have a way to convert from RAW to something else. I suppose I could find an app to do it, but I don’t want to install anything on my work laptop. Instead, I changed my camera workflow a little. Instead of saving RAW files, I am not saving a RAW file and a JPEG. I’m also saving the two formats to separate memory cards. RAW goes to the card in slot one, and JPEG goes to the card in slot two. That means I can put the JPEG card into my USB card reader, and upload to Flickr directly from the card. That way I am not saving anything to my work computer, and I can still take care of my photo a day thing during the work day.
Here is proof that it works:
Success, babie!
I still need to bring a headset mic upstairs to use for conference calls, and I need lightbulbs for the two little lamps on the shelf. Other than that I am good to go. The swapping between monitors didn’t work the way we’d planned, but I found a work around that is almost as good. I am going to work here tomorrow and see how it goes. If nothing else, I will be a ton warmer than I am when I work down cellar.
I have a few more changes I want to make to this setup, but for now it’s good enough.
ADDENDUM: Light bulbs, candles, a foot rest, and iTunes.
Back story: When the pandemic first hit and we all started to work from home, Jen and I both had a desk in the same home office. Quickly we realized that we were in each other’s way and I moved my desk to our bedroom. We stayed like that until I had a minor covid scare in September of 2021. At that point I moved into my step son’s bedroom to quarantine. I slept and worked there for a few weeks and then moved back to the bedroom.
In the spring of 2022 we had our cellar redone and in April I moved my desk downstairs. I’m still there. Over the course of this working from home journey, both of my step kids have moved into apartments in Burlington, VT. I promised them that they would always have a place in our house if they needed it, and that includes a place to sleep when they come to visit. Due to that, their bedrooms will remain their bedrooms forever.
When my step daughter moved out she left most of her furniture here. When my step son moved out he took all of his furniture with him. Jen and I have been trying to figure out a way to re-furnish his room. So far we’ve only put a day bed in there. He used it when he was home for a visit last week. That worked out well. What else can we do though?
The next move is going to be adding a computer desk to his room. In fact, I think I am going to move my work from home office in there. My plan is to work from the desk in his room when he’s not here, and work at my current desk in the cellar when he is. That means I am literally going to have two home office spaces. I will keep my music nook setup in the cellar as well. I make all of my guitar noise there as well as doing all of my morning exercise. That’s too much ruckus for upstairs next to Jen’s workspace, so that clearly stays downstairs. Everything for my work space though is going to be duplicated upstairs.
We found a desk online that looks like it will be perfect. We have a couple of monitors we’re not using that will be perfect. Jen has a keyboard and a laptop stand I can use. We ordered a wireless mouse and a webcam and a USB hub today. It’s going to take a week or two to put all of this together so I will keep working from the cellar for now, and then right about the time it will all be setup my step son will be on Christmas break so he’ll be coming home for part of it. While he’s home he can use the desk too. I might even look to put a cheap desktop machine there for him to use and for me to use for any non-work stuff that might come up while I’m in there. That seems like a decent plan.
Now we just have to make it all happen.
We had an announcement at work today. Starting in March our hybrid work environment is going to be slightly less than the current hybrid. Something like that, at least.
We’re going from four days at home and one day in the office each week to three days at home and two days in the office.
None of us are happy. We’ve been seeing the writing on the wall for a while, but now that the announcement has been made, it’s a huge bummer. We have plenty of time to work out the details (I’m thankful for that, at least) but I would much rather not have to deal with it. If it were up to me we’d be 100% remote.
Oh well.
I mentioned in yesterday’s daily writing prompt post… I think it was yesterday’s at least… that I’ve been writing pointless blog posts for about 17 years. I did something today that I have never, in all that time, done before. It has to do with my dumb haikus for you’s thing.
I have a new note on my iPhone where I have already written tomorrow’s haiku for you.
I did prep work. Really. I feel so gross. Like, this page is supposed to be spontaneous brain droppings, right? Where do I get off doing prep work?
Whatever. Anyway…
I have a couple of tasks for work that I wanted to crank out this weekend. It’s 7:11pm on the final day of this glorious three day weekend and I haven’t even started them yet. What the hell is wrong with me?
I had a bad case of what my mother used to call “the hungry horrors” after lunch today. I feel like I had a full days worth of between meal snacks in the space of about 30 minutes. It turned me into a giant gas bomb that’s ready to burst at any moment. It wasn’t bad enough to ruin dinner (I didn’t eat anything for four hours prior to dinner) but it’s left me uncomfortable and distracted. Blah. I have to push through and get that work done before I go to sleep tonight. Moron.
Okay, time for Robert to buckle down.
It’s just after 8:30am on the Friday before Labor Day weekend and I haven’t punched in to work yet. I had a few things to do first. I went with Harry to the garage to drop off his rental car and pick up his car. It’s all set and it looks as good as new. He just left to go back to Burlington. He’s going to miss his first class this morning, but that’s about the only downside to this visit. All is well again.
I’m less than nine hours away from a three day weekend. I just finished season 11 of the new Doctor Who. I have 20 episodes over two seasons left to go and then I’ll be all caught up. I’m on episode 17 of season seven of the original show. Eight episodes left in this season and something like 2346123472572 episodes left in the full series. I don’t expect to finish either series this weekend, but I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be done with the new show in a week or so which means I will be 100% caught up before the next episode airs in November.
What about the music project? I have 27 songs finished and 39 total in progress. I have four more songs ready to mix and I hope to crank them all out tonight. I have 30 days left, including today, and a ton of work still to go, but I think I am more or less on pace to finish on time. I’ll have a few days at Disney World where it will be tough to make progress, but I think I will be okay. I should note that even though I took over two weeks off in August, I still managed to finish an RPM Challenge Rules album in a month as I started and finished 12 songs within the calendar month. I started and finished 10 in July too. In order to hit 50 songs over all I will need to start and finish 11 songs in September. Three album in a months in a row isn’t a bad place to be. I think once this project is finished I will try to get back into the last re-recording project which has been left hanging for a little more than a year now.
I mentioned in the last post that my stomach has been a little less than 100% this morning. I had some trouble with water early on and had to deal with a minor bout of The Foamies after taking my vitamins. I only got eight ounces of water in during my exercise, but afterwards I was okay for breakfast and I am feeling much better now. I’ve managed another eight ounces since I came home from Harry’s auto shop. I think we’re back on track today. I might have a hamburger on the grill for lunch today. We’ll see how it goes.
Okay, it’s 8:50am now and I have to be punched into work by 9:00. I think I’ll hit publish on this masterpiece of an update and get my work day started. Lots to do today, lots to do. Eight hours and 40 minutes to go until the long weekend.
You can do it, Robbie! You can do it!
I set up my desk in the cellar before my surgery last year, at some point in April 2022. I had been thinking about changing things up for a month or so and today, without really planning to, I did something about it.
I now have a work computer desk and a personal computer desk. Sure this is a cable spaghetti mess, but I threw it all together during my lunch break today so it’s as good as you can expect on short notice. The monitors are my wife’s. Actually, the keyboard and the mouse are hers too. The webcam is too. Also the stand the laptop is sitting on. So… I guess it’s sort of my wife’s desk and I’m just using it. Oh yeah, the desk was hers too. So… yeah.
Inside the Red Head's Head 