many pleasant returns
Brief update today . . . except to say that today is the fifth and final day of my first week back at the office, and it has been pretty low key. If anyone might otherwise have concerns about being indoors around other people, the office has thus far remained largely empty. Like, when I was here for the Merchandising party last Friday, there were far more people here than I have seen on any day this week.
I suppose there could be more this afternoon? Tracy was here yesterday, but not even she got here until maybe 11 a.m. Part of it right now, I should also note, is that this is a holiday weekend, and there is more than one person just taking an extra day off today for it (including Eric and Scott). Noah is in the office today, but Wednesday was the one day this week that I had Scott to my left, Noah behind him, and Tracy behind me, the four of us in this section of four desks basically in a square.
I have yet to see either Community Relations or Marketing with more than one or two people in the office at one time; or more than three or four people here in IT or in Accounting. I think Merchandising tends to have the highest number, and I don't think we're ever at higher than, say, one-third capacity? In any event, being both vaccinated and in an office that remains far below in-person staffing capacity has made it easy for me not to be at all nervous about being back. Wednesday there was a meeting called by Steven that included him, Scott, Noah, Eric and myself; the only one not here was Eric, and Steven had him on Microsoft Teams and mirrored him up onto the huge monitor on the meeting room wall. That setup was a new one, but will likely happen again, I'm guessing.
It will be interesting to see what the future holds for this office space. I believe when we moved here in 2016 we had signed a ten-year lease, but who knows how long it will be before the majority of staff is here utilizing the entirety of the space again. There's a lot of factors there, though, not least of which is the question of how rapidly we will continue to expand with new stores going forward (god, I hope not as rapidly as we did over the past six years or so, when we increased store number by 50%, without much in the way of added Merchandising staff in the office, which has brought with it a bevy of new frustrations). I have a feeling it will be a while before we are at or even near capacity again, with so many people actually preferring to continue working from home, or move forward with a hybrid approach.
As for last night, it was mostly just watching TV. I rode my bike home from work, and then Shobhit and I did go to the Central District PCC to do a bit of shopping. We only filled two large tote bags but I still managed to spend just over $100, and that was after my staff discount! We did get some high priced items and/or stocked up on things that were on sale, though; the six half-gallons of Blue Diamond Almond Breeze would have accounted for $14 of that; two pints of Molly Moon Ice Cream, which are still expensive even being on sale $1 off, plus a 48oz Alden's, meant I spent $19 on ice cream alone. So almond milk and ice cream on their own accounted for a full third of the groceries I bought.
Anyway, I put groceries away when we got back, then helped Shobhit with a dinner that yielded a shit ton of leftovers, which thankfully was really quite tasty. I ate while watching this week's episode of Loki, which I found somewhat disappointing; I followed that with an ice cream cone I was convinced would result in my weight being up significantly this morning but it was only up a tenth of a pound! We'll see how it looks tomorrow. I then watched another episode of Sweet Tooth on Netflix.
I had my beloved Deep Indian Kitchen eggplant naan pizza for lunch today, my first time having that at the office for lunch since probably February 2020. I loved it so, as I did eating it out on our balcony. I sure do love it here.
[posted 12:39 pm]