“Remoted” – Day 430 (Thursday)

The days are still feeling like one big stretch of blurry blah, and despite 14 months of the working from home, it feels harder. It makes no sense to me that working from home felt easier at the beginning when it was new and completely unfamiliar. Maybe it’s a case of “familiarity breeds contempt.”

Starting to pop.

There were the usual work things with reviews and project miscommunications and flukes that might someday be hilarious.  Earlier this week, on one project, after four attempts to deliver proof files that were not arriving in my inbox, our IT group was contacted. It turned out the emails had been trapped by a scanning filter, and for whatever reason, there was no notice to let me know the emails had been quarantined. The problem was the standard human resources disclaimer with “… makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, age, national origin …” and more specifically, the word “sex.” Oy. It was a bit funnier today, now that the printed pieces have delivered.

Tonight, after work there was a quick trip to Home Depot for the fabric spray paint for the umbrella project this weekend. I didn’t want to go there, but when I checked the website, it showed there was one can of the color I wanted in stock after there had been nine cans of it last week. The fear was having to spend time on the weekend chasing down spray paint instead of spraying the spray paint. So I went.

The car hadn’t been driven since Mother’s Day, and has a thick and embarrassing coating of pollen. “Wash the car” is now added to the ever-growing list of life maintenance tasks. On the drive back home, I was thinking about pizza, which has been the case since Tuesday morning when a colleague did her speech for our public speaking class presentations about making pizza with her aunt as child and now with her children.

Not pizza, tuna and chips. 

 It would have been easy enough to make happen, as there were probably a half dozen pizza places on the way home from HD, but I decided to wait until tomorrow night. Fresh pizza, when it happens, has been a Friday or Saturday night "special" supper. The idea of ordering pizza on Thursday unleashed the fear of waking up on Friday thinking it was Saturday and instead of parking my butt at the desk for a regular workday, dashing out the door with the dogs to the vet. These are the things I worry about and plan around. This is what life is currently reduced to. Supper was a tuna fish sandwich, which has no chance of day of week confusion. 

Approaching my house, there was a kid from the house across from mine, junior high age, dressed in yellow shorts and no shirt, laying in the street. Literally laying on his back on the asphalt smack in the middle of the street as if he was a speed bump. I tooted the horn lightly, he turned his head to look my way, then got up and went into his house as if this was all perfectly normal. I can’t imagine what that was about. That was the oddball event of the day. Less odd and more normal, there was a bunny in the front yard this afternoon and the rhododendron is beginning to flower.