“Remoted” Workday 195 / Day 296 (Wednesday)

Hooray for a quick read.

The day started much like many before it, and probably many more to come. In an effort to avoid a repeat of last year’s failed goal of reading one book per month, I picked up a book. Instead of mindlessly scrolling Facebook and email, I read Charlotte’ s Web for a half hour before work. It was chosen because it was nearby in the bookcase, and if I read it before, it was so long ago that I don’t remember much beyond there being a pig and a spider. Plus, as a bonus, it’s short and I’m already one-third of the way through it, meaning there is a chance for success at least for the first month. For some reason, I kept hearing the voice of the pig from the movie Babe while reading Wilbur's words in the book, and now I want to watch Babe again for about the millionth time.

Coffee is a standard element for the start of most of my days. On those rare days of awakening uninterested in coffee, it’s usually because I’m sick. The accompanying home-office breakfast food item is generally a bagel, toast, granola bar, or oatmeal. This is basically the same range of food options as when working from the office-office, except for the bagels. Those were a part of the office-office only when a colleague would bring them into the office from some amazing bagel place. Since discovering the magical world of Amazon Prime Whole Foods grocery deliveries, bagels and lox have been a treat at the BungaLowell, but the bagels are still not as good as those bagels at the office.

Great lunch, but not breakfast.

This morning’s selection was maple brown sugar oatmeal. Every oatmeal eater I know claims that it is a filling breakfast with staying power. Unfortunately, I have not found this to be the case, and through some quirk of my metabolism, I’m hungry quicker after eating oatmeal than if I skipped breakfast altogether. While preparing the packet of oatmeal, the thought of making two of them flitted through my cranium, but it was decided for the sake of science to stick to the usual one packet and see if things had changed. It turns out that nothing has changed. Oatmeal eaten at 8:15 left me ready to gnaw my own arm off from hunger by 10:00. Luckily, there was a lot of work to be done, which redirected my mind from the hunger thing. A savory kale, mushroom, onion, and sweet potato soup was planned for lunch, and 10:00 was just too early for that. 

The home-office workday was rather routine and unsurprising with words written, words edited, projects reviewed, video meetings attended. That is, it was routine until an afternoon check of the news to see if the generally routine Electoral College vote count was proceeding with or without dramatics and histrionics. Until this recent election, I never would have thought to watch any part of what I would have assumed to be a snooze fest.

It turned out that events out in the real world, hundreds of miles beyond the general peace and solitude of the home office, were anything but a snooze fest. The news showed thousands of people on Capitol Hill, some of whom eventually forced their way the Capitol Building. It’s the worst reality show I’ve seen in a while and it delivered stress and a headache. As much as I generally try to avoid politics, the events of today are impossible to ignore.

The temptation to doom scroll the social media and news sites has been strong all night. To avoid the stress it would deliver, solace and distraction were sought in the predictable plot of a Hallmark Channel movie. True to form, the businesswoman returned from the big city to her small hometown and reconnected an old friend and there was the inability of each to realize they had feelings for the other until three minutes before the end. Oh, and the lead actress reminds me strongly of a colleague. After the unusual events of the day, it was a brief comfort.