“Remoted” – Workday 74 / Day 100 (Wednesday)

Day 100 since being remoted. Whew!

On the one hand, it’s hard to believe I stayed put for so much of it. On the other hand, it hasn’t really felt that long. The “first 100 days” was coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt and is now “considered a benchmark to measure the early success of a president” (according to Wikipedia). 

In thinking about measuring my “first 100 days of the pandemic” I don’t have a lot of successes to tout. It seems there are none, really.  Most of what has happened is stuff I would have done anyway under the guise of being a functional adult with a job.

I followed the rules and stayed home for the first chunk of the 100 days, leaving for the first time in mid-May (Day 52) to make sure the car still ran and then to go see Mom for a physically distanced Mother’s Day driveway visit (Day 55). I still don’t leave the house without a pretty good reason, and most of the “good reasons” have been medical, dental, vet or auto service appointments. Why bother, really?

So far, I built two puzzles and read two books in their entirety. In 100 days as a kid with no job, I would have devoured every book in the house. (Young me used to even snatch up Mom’s Book of the Month Club selections and read them before she did.)  I fed myself multiple times each day, catered to the two Canine Overlords, and managed to not scream at the annoying neighbors and their equally annoying friends and family from the nuisance house across the street.  I haven’t burned the house down with my cooking (or even set off the smoke detectors) or injured anything (or myself) with the lawn mower.

It turns out, working from home is much better than I thought it would be. I’m able to focus and get stuff done. At the end of the day, it’s been easy to walk away from the desk until the next day.

In the non-working time, it turns out I love staying home doing not much, and eagerly look forward to retirement to do more of it. At least I’m a lot less worried about the “what would I do all day?” part of being a (probably) broke-ass retiree. The answer to the question is “nothing.” I will sit around and do a lot of nothing just like most weekends so far in the pandemic. It’s all good.

If anyone had told my younger self, say 23- or 30 year-old me, that I would someday spend 100 consecutive days quite content, mostly at home where I worked and also lived alone, it would have seemed impossible to fathom. My FOMO game was huge then. I was constantly out, convinced that the one night I stayed home would be the one night that everything great happened and I would be the loser who missed it. I got over that a long time ago.

I’m sure this experience would have been different if I lived with someone or had some sort of a man-friend or didn’t have the the dogs, but that hasn’t been my world for a long time. Having the dogs to take care of has been great, and now I worry for them when this is over (it will be over someday, right?). Younger me would have worried that fashions had changed and when I went back out to the world my clothes would be all wrong and outdated, but older me prefers vintage clothes, so a lot of my stuff is already old and outdated on purpose.

It’s been good practice, the first 100 pandemic days. It will be interesting to see what the next 100 days will bring.