“Remoted” – Workday 36/Day 45 (Thursday)

Forty-Five days without leaving the house, and it’s not horrible. Even though my commute from home to the office-office is only two miles, it can take anywhere from one song on the radio to 30 minutes. I don’t miss the uncertainty of the commute time, nor the “how many laps will I have to do in the garage to find an open parking spot?” game.  So, the home-office commute is a win.

Party of one, your table is ready.

Dining out has been rare for most of the past ten years (for many reasons), so that required no transition at all. Cooking for one lets me eat whatever weird stuff I want when I feel like it. A slice of bread with butter for supper, followed by potato chips? That was Wednesday’s supper menu. Thursday’s supper was a turnip and carrot casserole that would be merely a side dish at my Mom’s house, and probably only at Thanksgiving, but I haven’t lived there for a few years now and I get to make the rules. 

The solitude isn’t as bad as I feared, but there were decades of training that started in childhood with being sent to my room as punishment, which meant my brother and sister were not allowed to “visit” in my room. It was heaven! I would sometimes be a mouthy brat on purpose, just to be sent to my room for uninterrupted time lounging on my bed and reading a book in peace and quiet.

Somewhere along the line as an adult, the fear of missing out was abandoned and there was a shift from needing to be out and around people every night to being quite content hunkered down at home alone. It might have something to do with moving quite a few times, not having many friends to go out with, and an aversion to going out alone, but whatever, it’s proved helpful and familiar now. And unlike when I was a teen grounded for missing curfew (every five minutes late meant a week grounded), now there are cell phones and internet and Zoom meetups.

Once working from home is done for the day, it’s making supper and cleaning up after it, watching TV, and sleeping, just like working at the office, so it’s not so bad. Not really. As long as I don’t actually think about it.