Clothes.

(If someone has a suggestion or several suggestions for new topics, I’m all ears 😉 )

 So it turns out that I was wrong (a  little) about clothes. 

Also, I bought myself a new pair of pajama pants!  They are soft and super long and new, which is nice. 

I’ve been alternating pajama pants with the shirts I normally wear to work in spring & summer, since I’m in online meetings all the time and sometimes called on to turn on the camera, and have even pulled out my skirts on occasion. 

Fancy, right?

Except they’re my old black knit skirts, essentially sweat pants in skirt form.  I’m clever 😉

It’s not even that I think people will notice if I wear the same shirt every day; it just makes me happy to change my shirt more.  

Also, I noticed that some of the lower-necked shirts that I loved happen to look sort of funky on-camera; i.e, they don’t have a bottom of the neckline unless I aim the camera like it’s looking down my cleavage. 

Of which, if you’ve never seen me, I have a bit. Ahem. 

I don’t want my boss looking down my cleavage and I don’t think he wants to do so, either. 

Thus, the slightly-higher-necked shirts where the whole neckline shows on camera. 

And lighter colors because I look a little washed out in mid-March. 

The things Zoom does to you… 

How about you?  Are you spending too much time on webcam?  

It’s just before day 10 of my work-from-home adventure.  I’m finding it harder to differentiate the weekends from the week.

I was watching a podcast where they were talking about tips for working from home, and one of those is probably part of my problem – have your “Work area” be just for work.

My work are is for work, and play, and writing – it was designed to be my writing office – so I’m in there no matter the day of the week. Also, I’m in the process of organizing it, so I’m in there even more.

In addition, having moved to weekend eating patterns all week long probably doesn’t help.

In short, I’m Doing Things Wrong 😉

It’s not so much that Monday still feels like the weekend, it’s that halfway through Sunday I had no idea what day of the week it was.  “Is this Friday?” That sort of feeling.

I’m not doing work on the weekends – well, not Day Job work; there’s house cleaning and firewood stacking and stuff like that – my boss scolds me if I answer an email outside of work hours.  So there’s that difference.  But with this job just not being that onerous to start with, it’s not a very huge or distinct difference (Especially when sitting through meetings is sort of like sitting through a sort of boring podcast…)

So how are you differentiating your time-off from your time-on?  Is it hard for you?

 Yesterday, for breakfast, we had steel cut oats with applesauce, cooked on the wood stove slowly. 

When I asked T what he wanted for breakfast today, he answered “pancakes.”

Our eating patterns are, ah, suddenly All Weekend All the Time. 

(though pancakes are only a possibility ’cause I don’t have a meeting this morning; they take too much stove time otherwise.)

Since i started working from home, we’ve had lots of days of my standard Breakfast Oatmeal (Rolled oats and Bob’s Red Mill 7 grain), a couple days of steel cut oats, some eggs on toast… 

what I think of as Weekend Breakfasts, big and filling before we (sometimes) go out and Do Things. 

(At work, breakfast is small, generally cheerios or yogurt, and then lunch is often from the dining hall across the street which, being the hotellie dining hall, has really good food.)

(I do miss those tacos, even though T’s cooking is amazing.)

Our whole eating pattern has changed with this work-from-home, and I wonder if I’ll miss big breakfasts when the world goes back to normal. 

How are your eating patterns changing, if at all?  Are you keeping to your same routines, as suggested, and how do you manage that?

(And then I lost 10 minutes looking up “Keep to your Routine” memes, oops.)

One thing I didn’t think I’d say but found myself saying yesterday was “there’s less distractions from the screen at home.”

Fair warning, this post’s a little mopier than the last few. 

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One thing I didn’t think I’d say but found myself saying yesterday was “there’s less distractions from the screen at home.”

When you take it apart, it’s kind of true. In the office, I could get up and take a walk around the building with my co-worker, no matter what the weather. That’s a five minute walk (It’s a big building).  People would stop in and want to talk (I miss the Lecturer in Recent Runes and my favorite facilities guy, who calls Nice Co-Worker and me Sisters of Mercy). Or I would get up and talk. 

Okay, I can get up and talk to Husband, but I can also, you know, Discord him and I’m trying to get him in the mindset that I am At Work between 7:30 and 4:20. 

And then, of course, most of my socialization, most of my entertainment, my writing, and now even my meetings are all on screens. 

This is actually more screen time than I used to have in the office, which is a little funny and a little migraine-inducing. 

So I’ve decided that I’m going to try to get up once an hour and do something, even if it’s just walking to the other end of the house and back twice.  I’ve got the exercise bike; I did five minutes on that in the middle of the day (Yesterday was cold and drippy. Today I could actually take a walk outside, if weather.com isn’t lying to me.)

I did okay with that yesterday, in part aided by the Dr’s appointment I thought I had (turned out it’s APRIL 24th. I Swear they gave me the wrong date….)

(Our grocery store was pretty empty; also, it still has no TP. )

How’re you guys doing with screen time?  What do you do to get away from the computer when you’re working from home?

(Or, if you’re not working from home, how are you keeping busy?)

I’m thinking of taking up yoga, but ssshhhh, don’t tell my mother. 

 Day Six of my work from home, and I’m contemplating the advantages and disadvantages in re. sick time and being sick. 

For instance, the Friday before I started this, I worked from home because I had a cold and I wanted to nap at lunch but I felt good enough to work.  

Today, I was up a portion of the night with a pounding migraine and I’m not sure how well I can think – but I can show up to a meeting, then go nap until the next meeting, and so on, and since my life is like 3/4 meetings and Zoom trainings since this whole thing started, that’s like a half day. 

Is this a plus? Is it a negative?

I mean, it lets me husband my sick days.  It lets me save them for, say, I can barely move, which I’ve had. But on the other hand, it means that I’m less likely to take as much sick time and recovery time as I might need, when I could just log on for a couple hours. 

Right now, it’s “just a migraine”, so I’m going to try to show up to meetings.  But I know that when I feel like this, I can’t do critical thinking very well at all; it’s like the migraine is literally sitting on the thinking parts. Also, I think my focus is even worse than normal.

Okay, I’m trying to write a thoughtful post about whether or not being able to take partial sick days mid-day is a good thing or not while explaining that I can’t think while I have a migraine.  Does the amusement of this hit anyone else?

Right, so, if you’re working from home, what’s your personal sick day policy? What’s your office’s? How does it differ from when you’re working from work?

I.e. obviously, there’s not going to be a “please don’t come in and breathe on everyone” when you’re already at your workplace by being home, right?

 Day 5 of working from home: I almost miss my work workstation. 

I am, I believe, doing a lot better than many of my co-workers, because I already had a home office. I’ve doing the All Day Writing there the last couple Christmas breaks, so I know I can sit there for long stretches, and it’s an actual desk and then a “docking station” where I plug my laptop into a proper keyboard and monitor (I always use a proper mouse).  

I also have a standing desk set-up next to it which I’ve been trying to use for about a half hour to an hour a day, or until my feet really complain. 

My real problem is posture. In part because I like to use my laptop as a laptop a lot normally, I get comfortable looking down at my monitor, which yes, I know is awful. But it makes getting my chair-and-monitor set up so that I don’t make a crink in my neck by the end of the day… tricky.  I might need another textbook under my monitor, and I already have about 8″ of textbook. (My laptop sits on two board games and a dictionary.)

I’ll probably get it set up and comfortable by the time they declare we can all go back to our offices – although maybe if I dragged the Tempurpedic chair I use in the other room in here I might be more comfy…

People discuss work from home ‘offices’ as the dining room table (we don’t have one of those) or the bedroom and, while I have worked from bus and a couple times from car, I can’t imagine doing that full time.  I wonder how much of my willingness to and comfort with work-from-home is due to having a solid office? (Even if it lacks a back wall.)

(It’s a three-walled space backing on the living room, it’s not like I’ve, you know, knocked out an exterior wall!)

If you’re working from home – and it sounds like most of the world is at this point – how’s your home-office set up?

(are you remembering to stretch?)

Yesterday, Day Three of my Telecommuting Journey…

The power went out. 

The internet also went out. 

(We have two UPSs.  The router & cable modem are plugged into one of them. I have about an hour, hour and a half of time working if I turn my laptop to dimmest, etc…. IF the internet isn’t also out.)

It was just after my late lunch, and I really wanted a nap, so I walked out to the middle of the road, got enough signal for gmail and Discord, emailed my boss a telegram (Power out, internet out, will contact when back) and pinged my friends on Discord.

Then I took a nap. 

I mean, my entire job is online. I’d have had maybe… 20 minutes of cleaning my office if I was at work. 

I did some writing when I woke up, called NYSEG just in case nobody else had (1290 people affected, we imagine it will be about 5 p.m. when we get it fixed), played some Minecraft (obv. not the shared server), ordered pizza (from the end of the block), picked UP that pizza, and played Tiles & Tales once I got the tablet with games charged up.

The power came back on at about 9. 

In ordinary circumstances, I might have gone to a local library or cafe to work but… nothing’s open. 

Do you have plans for work if the power/internet go out?

I’m going to try to make a trend of this, doing it before work in the morning.

👩‍💻

Day three of Telecommuting: My co-workers are starting to suspect I’m actually another cat.

Honestly, I think Oli may be worried and Merit thinks I’m just sick again, and Theo just ignores everyone during the day.

But I was going to talk about supervision. 

For me, this is pretty much exactly the same as being at work – because my boss is always remote (well, a few times a year he visits the office, but with the border to Canada closed, it’s going to be a while). For most of the admins, there won’t be a lot of difference, because the professor that supervises them is either usually just in their office or not even that.

I mean, except the one extrovert in the office.  I imagine she’s going to go mad.

(we did Meyers-Briggs at Admin Excellence Training summer of ’18.  She was like “OH this explains so much” when everyone else at the table came back Introvert.)

But with all that, I still found myself checking the calendar to see if my boss was “at a conference” (he’s got at least two that are tele-conferences now.) yesterday.

As far as I can tell, no.  

But Oli did his best to fill in boss’s virtual absence anyway by sitting on my desk and staring at me.  Good kitty. I feel well supervised. 

How about you?  How do your supervisors feel the need to fill in that gap?