— चार हजार आठ सौ चौदह —

One thing I kind of like about working from home is that it's an office with pets. Two cats around, cats I love dearly, all the time. I'm typing this very sentence with Guru in my lap.

There is also a flip side. One thing I kind of hate about working from home is sharing my work space with animals that are insanely emotionally needy. Guru especially, as it happens—for several days now, he takes random moments of each day to just loudly meow over and over again, with no indication of what the fuck he wants except for attention. Sometimes he'll finally lay down on the bed behind me, kind of just lounging there, and he'll continue with the meowing. Shut the fuck up!

I do miss being around actual people. I was never a big fan of meetings but I look forward to the Zoom meetings now, just because it's some human interaction. I have my weekly checkin with Eric this afternoon, and I enjoy those just for the sake of conversation. Tomorrow will bring the weekly Zoom Friday Office Lunch Meetup, which are kind of a godsend.

Now, yes, of course Shobhit is an "actual person." He's also my husband, and I am around him a lot to begin with. We need more than just one other person to be around us in our lives. When he's home, he often interrupts me when I am trying to work (sometimes it's a nice break and sometimes it's annoying, it just depends); the flip side of that is how often when he is off to work himself (being in retail, he never works from home) I am left for half or most of the work day by myself anyway.

He worked fairly late yesterday, not having started his one shift this week at Total Wine & More until 1:00, then getting off at 8:00. When I was done with work, I only left the condo to check the mail; I otherwise watched the last two episodes of Barkskins on Hulu, finally finishing the season. I like the show a lot and really hope it gets renewed for a new season. It got mixed reviews, and I'm not really sure why; what I love is the broader context, and how the novel on which it's based tracks the descendants of these 17th-century characters all the way to the 21st century and the through line is the destruction of our forests and environment. The show on its own does not make that clear, but presumably if they by some miracle manage multiple more seasons, that will become more clear.

We still have last Sunday's episode of Lovecraft Country to watch, but as late as Shobhit got home from work and how much TV I had already watched, I decided not to press watching it last night. Maybe tonight. Shobhit gets off earlier today.

— चार हजार आठ सौ चौदह —

— चार हजार आठ सौ चौदह —

I just finished up my biweekly (or more accurately, twice-monthly) FaceTime lunch with Karen. Field Roast veggie corn dogs are on sale at PCC so I bought some yesterday, and had half the bag for lunch. Yummy.

We spent an hour kind of just shooting the shit, talking about a bunch of things. She apparently has taken the week off of work this week, and last weekend she and Dave and Anita all drove out to Hurricane Ridge—taking five hours to drive each way, which is much longer than it should have been, because of reroutes and a car accident on the way there and just general traffic on the way back. The time they spent actually at Hurricane Ridge, though, they had a great time. Even accounting for the two elderly couples in a car that was accidentally driven right over barrier curbs in their parking spot in the lot, which if they had any more momentum they would have gone right over and down the huge hill on the other side.

We also talked a lot about TV. I gave her two new recommendations in both Barkskins on Hulu and The Boys on Amazon Prime. She sounded pretty compelled by both, but especially the former.

Anyway I've come back to my work desk with a slew of emails arrived over lunch so I guess I should get to that.

— चार हजार आठ सौ चौदह —

[posted 1:06 pm]