Here’s just one small reason why working from home is better than working from the office.
When you’re working from home and you take a gulp of water out of your water bottle and somehow, magically, end up spilling it all over your shirt, you can just change your shirt and no one ever notices.
Not so when you are working from the office.
Ugh, I am a friggin’ slob.
On a crazy scale from 1-10, today has been a 467037471509436.2.
Holy crap, has it been a crazy day!
You know what though? I tested negative for Covid-19 today. Neh-gah-tiv. Zero Covid. Zip, zilch, nada. Nothing. Covid free since ’93, to paraphrase Mr Ted Mosby.
The love of my life and I are going to have dinner together tonight instead of having dinner at the same time in separate rooms. It’s going to be awesome. On multiple occasions today there were spontaneous hugs and smooches. It was awesome.
Granted, everything else about today was absolute insanity, but the non-quarantine stuff ruled.
Now the question is, what do I do about my work desk. We had talked a little of moving my work day desk out of the bedroom into one of the kids rooms (obviously moving it back to the bedroom when they come home). At first I was not happy working in Harry’s room, but the windows make it a winner. He has two windows that face the back yard. I have had them open for every second that I’ve been quarantinied in here. It’s kinda glorious. The windows in our bedroom face the street, which is nice, but facing the back yard is so much nicer.
Naw, as nice as the air flow in here is, I think I’ll move my work desk back to the bedroom. That’s the spot for me.
Happy No Covid/No More Quarantine Day!
WOOHOO!
The five day weekend is over. Not that I had a five day weekend, but I digress. I’m still isolating in Harry’s room, and today is the first day that I will be on video conferences with folks at work. I’m going to have to explain the Harry Potter book cover poster on the wall behind me. It’s actually not a poster, it’s a puzzle. Harry was able to put it together and hang it up without having it fall apart. How amazing is that? What the camera can’t see is the Star Wars poster off to my right. That one would need no explanation.
I have the windows open and the mini USB fan on low. The goal is to keep the air moving. Something about all of that time at my parents house in the sweltering heat with fans blowing right on my face all day has made me really want to have the air moving around me as I work.
I closed all three exercise rings yesterday. I weighed myself today. Closing the three rings once did not magically reduce my weight at all. What the hell? It was my first weigh in since mid August and I was up a pound and a half since then. I think we can probably attribute that to stress eating over the weekend so I think maybe what I have learned is that Intermittent Fasting is helping me hold my weight steady more than it’s helping lose weight. I will take that as a huge win. Now the exercise can start lowering that astronomically high weight total, and then we can throw in some diet and some bariatric surgery to get it down the rest of the way. Wait, what?
Okay. Punching in to work. Have a good Tuesday, everyone. Labor day is past, summer is over, it is officially winter in New England. Bite me, Mother Nature.
Until next time……
I’m working from my parents house today. I have an absolute mountain of work to do, but fortunately I only have one meeting today and it was over by 10:30.
The pandemic sent us all home for a year and a quarter and counting which means we don’t hold meetings in person which means we’re teleconferencing like crazy. I have two tools for this process. A webcam that sits on top of my monitor and a headset mic/headphones that allows me to keep the other end of the conferences private from whoever is home with me, and cut down on ambient noise making it’s way to those on the other end of the line.
After over a year of use, the webcam is dying. It could be the cable or the USB connector, I don’t know. I just know that sometimes the image is a mess. I’ve switched to using the webcam built into my laptop. When I work from my parents house I can use the webcam built into one of the monitors I’m borrowing from my brother’s workstation.
Unlike the webcam, the headset is still firing on all cylinders. When I work at my parents house I bring it with me.
Usually.
I forgot it today.
Muthapussbucket.
I feel naked without it. How quickly we become dependent on little, seemingly insignificant things.
Telecommuting is pretty great. You get to work from home. It’s nice. Covid-19 has put us onto a nine-months-and-counting telecommuting streak, but it’s cool. No traffic. Jeans and sneakers. Able to have dinner with my family every night. Sweet.
There’s only one downside. I’m dealing with it right now.
My wife is on the other side of the house getting caught up on The Mandalorian. She’s down to the last couple of episodes in season one.
The downside of telecommuting is I can hear the TV in the distance but I can’t sit and watch it with her.
I would really like to go watch it with her. I cannot though. I must work. This is the way. Damn it.
Over at our next door neighbors’ house, this is happening…
It’s the last business day before Thanksgiving. It’s probably the day that drags along more than any other for me, and now topping it off I have a wood chipper running at 100,000 decibels at the end of my driveway.
Yeah, work is going to be productive today.
Yikes.
My co-worker hasn’t jumped on my desk in a while, but she’s digging in her claws today.
It doesn’t matter which desk I’m using, she always ends up joining me.
Jen brought a whole bunch of stuff over to the conference call nook and upgraded it again.
It needs one more change because the “o” key on that keyboard is wonky. I’ll swap it out for the keyboard hidden off to the right at some point tonight. I stole that headset from Jen because she wasn’t using it. The postman just delivered another one. Almost as soon as I stole it she decided she wanted it back but she was still nice enough to let me keep it.
I expect that I’ll be the one using this desk, but it’s just a laptop dock so Jen can use it if she needs it. The kids too. We’re all set up.
I had a shitty night’s sleep last night. I went to bed early but I kept waking up. My back was sore and I couldn’t get comfortable. The numbers I got from my watch this morning showed that my sleep was okay but nothing special. I was really tired when I first got up but I’ve felt a little better as the day rolled on. I just ate my lunch so I’m feeling sleepy again.
I’ve read that trouble sleeping can be a side effect of all the stress from the social distance. I’ll buy that, but I don’t think that’s my current problem. I think I just sometimes have a little back pain. My stress issue is stress eating but I’m not going to stress over that right now.
Its been warm enough the last couple of days to open a window in the office. That has felt great. It’s too cold today though and that’s bumming me out. We’ve got cold and rain in the forecast for the next few days. Again, major bumming out. I needs me some Springtime right now. I ordered some screens for our bedroom windows. I can’t wait for a warm, breezy night when we can sleep with the windows open. It’s going to be bliss.
Nice weather would go a long way toward making the whole COVID-19 thing a little more tolerable, don’t you think?
Inside the Red Head's Head 