“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 767 (Friday) – foraging friday

There was nothing at home to carry in for lunch today. The freezer was checked and found to be full of uncooked meats of both the actual and pretend-meat varieties, lots of random partial loaves of bread, and things like fancy baked potato things and grocery store pizza that require 20 to 30 minutes baking in a proper oven. 

No lunch here.

The refrigerator wasn't much better, stocked with condiments, assorted cheeses, soju, beer, white wine, a box of oat milk, eggs, and container of pasta sauce. The cabinet was chock full of ingredients and nothing that could be taken and warmed quickly in the office microwave or toaster oven.

Effort would be required to forage for lunch downtown. Eating lunch out has been successfully avoided for most of the time since the return to the office for 60% of the workweek. Once, maybe twice, lunch was a veggie sub from Subway, but the idea of eating a loaf of bread sprinkled with the meager fillings was not appealing. If the filling is taken from one half the sandwich and set into the other half, and the now-empty half of bread tossed out, the sandwich is improved by an adequate amount of filling.

Today, the winner of the lunchtime roulette was Espresso pizza, the benchmark against which all other pizza is measured. A colleague and I walked over together. One slice of pizza with mushroom was $2.56, making it the new favorite budget-friendly, fast lunch. It was good, with a large bubble in the crust and the famous sweet Espresso tomato sauce, and I burned my mouth with the first couple bites because I was hungry, impatient, and like my hot food nuclear hot despite the frequent injuries.

It took only a couple minutes for my slice to be warmed in the oven, but the colleague’s sub was another story. It took 40 minutes to be prepared, during which time nine pizzas in stacks of various heights accumulated atop the ovens awaiting pickup. During the lengthy wait there was plenty of time to observe the pizza production. The sub order, meanwhile, was forced to transform from eat-in to takeout by the time it was finally prepared.

Plenty of parking today.

Back at the office, it was Friday quiet with four of us in the cavernous fourth floor space. Like the ride to work and the parking garage, the office was sparsely populated and quiet with plenty of room to spread out. The commute was easy and the parking was plentiful. "London Calling" came on the radio as I was parking, and there may have been a solid three minutes of singing in the car before exiting the vehicle. After the energetic musical start and another coffee from the local coffee spot, the workday was productive and the lunch was tasty. Overall, it was quite a good Good Friday.