— पांच हजार एक सौ ग्यारह —
Day 5 of 2022 Work From Home. I've got to say, it's a mixed bag.
Here are the pros. In the dead of winter in Seattle, I have to admit, it's nice not having to spend as much time outside in it. I stay warm and cozy and can just watch and/or listen to the rain outside through the windows. I suppose much more importantly, I am getting far less exposure to COVID during this unprecedented spike. There are times when I do enjoy having a cat on my lap while I work.
Here are the cons. Work efficiency goes down for sure, especially with the extra interruptions I get—from my husband, from my cats (wanting attention; whining incessantly for indeterminate reasons; literally vomiting). I'm grateful to have figured out how to use this old Samsung TV monitor as an external monitor so I'm not relying solely on my small laptop screen as I did for fully five months in 2020, but the dual monitors I still have left at work are still way better. I am now getting the feeling I may be working from home
at least through the end of February, which I suppose does beg the question: should I just go ahead and dismantle my dual monitors at work and bring them home again? I'm still thinking I probably won't, mostly because this screen I have at home now, while not ideal, is a workable compromise. Also should there ever be a need to return to the office earlier than that, in an N95 mask maybe, having the monitors already there will make the transition back and forth far easier. Honestly I should have set this Samsung option up before this week anyway.
I'm just . . . so tired of it all. I mean, who isn't, right? And I love working at the office. Right now what I'm holding onto is that I am looking at working from home again for a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months, and almost certainly not for a straight 14 months again. Sometimes that's just the way getting out of shitty circumstances works: fourteen steps forward and two steps back isn't that horrible in the grand scheme of things, I suppose.
— पांच हजार एक सौ ग्यारह —
— पांच हजार एक सौ ग्यारह —
I showed Ivan that
projection graph for Washington State last night, which predicts a statewide peak on February 4. He actually said, "Cool!" I was like, what? "I think it's kind of scary," I replied.
"I'm not scared," he said. "I'm not scared of it at all." He proceeded to tell me about a doctor he spoke with in 2020 when he was still in New Zealand, who told him eventually all of us are going to get it. This was exactly what Sherri was saying on New Year's Day, and either way my response is the same: that's a dangerous attitude to take. We don't want everyone just to throw their hands up in surrender.
I mean, to a large degree, that's what this country has done, at least when it comes to the Omicron variant. No lockdowns whatsoever this time, even though it's by far the most severe surge to date. Granted, a ton of the metrics are still different and in our favor: very few vaccinated people, even in light of surging breakthrough infections, are likely to die or even be hospitalized by this variant, or even necessarily get that sick, especially if they've gotten a booster shot. I think this is a large part of comparatively throwing caution to the wind, except that hospitals are nearing crisis mode again as mostly (of course) unvaccinated people get infected and overwhelm the health care system.
And god only knows whether I'll succeed at this, but I'd sure like to get past this surge without getting it at all. That would be nice. I know I took some real calculated risks by gathering with family twice over the holidays, but now I have significantly pulled back in the wake of that, as I don't want to compound cumulative risk over time. I'm not even seeing any movies in a theater this week. (We'll see whether I do later. I don't know.)
— पांच हजार एक सौ ग्यारह —
As for last night, Shobhit came home grumpy and didn't take well for my resisting his suggestion that I wait an hour or two to drive my receiver paperwork to the office after he got home from work, telling me the weather was really bad and so was traffic. But, Google Maps was telling me, even showing traffic patterns on side streets (which Shobhit had noted the regular Maps app does not do), that the drive was only 14 minutes. When I started to tell him that, he just snapped, "Go then!" and when I even tried to say anything more he was like, "Just go!" In his defense, I guess sort of, he did have dinner ready when I got back and seemed to be in a better mood.
And my drive did indeed take roughly 15 minutes. There was a bit heavier traffic than usual but nothing all that bad. I didn't feel like it slowed me down than regular traffic lights did on their own. Also I have no idea how much difference this actually made, but I took the unusual route of actually following the suggested route by Google Maps completely. Usually I drive straight down Pine to 1st Avenue before turning right; this suggested turning right on Boren, then left on Stewart and taking
that down to 1st Avenue. I suspect that may have saved me one or two minutes.
I took somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes at the office itself, as I had a huge stack of receivers I had to work through yesterday—we even got emailed by Accounting that our folders were "overflowing," because a ton of them had finally come in the courier and was probably a week's worth, presumably due to the snowy weather last week. So that took a huge chunk of my work day yesterday, and thus took me a few minutes longer just to distribute them all into their respective store folders where I return them. Thew new stack I picked wasn’t nearly as thick, thankfully.
I also needed to print out a couple of things, get my flavored syrup mixture into a small lidded cup to use for my London Fog I like to drink on Fridays during work, now doing it at home, and of course swipe a handful of what are now dark chocolate Hershey's Kisses at the front desk.
I came home, had a very nice dinner, then started watching the first of this week's two episodes of
Station Eleven on HBO Max in the bedroom. But then Shobhit convinced me to watch
Deadpool 2 with him, which was not great but was fun and even maybe a little better than the first one. I barely managed to finish the
Station Eleven episode before bed, so I'll watch the other one from this week tonight.
— पांच हजार एक सौ ग्यारह —
[posted 12:27 pm]
