Hello! It’s been a while… again. Sorry about that. I keep starting these terribly sporadic posts with an apology. Maybe, eventually, I’ll get back on the regular writing kick. I hope I do, since my writing muscles have atrophied quite a bit. My vocabulary has dropped to the equivalent of a middle schooler, I’ve forgotten how to use punctuation, and I just had to look up how to add an html link, because I couldn’t remember.

I have nothing much to write about, because nothing much is going on. I’m still working from home. Most of my days lack human interaction, wherein lies the bulk of my what to write about material, because for the most part, people suck (or, at least, I suck at dealing with them). I sit in my lovely, recently re-nested home, looking out at a blue southern California sky with big green trees swaying in the distant breeze and my personal forest of houseplants in the foreground. I watch whatever I want on one computer, while working on another. My dog is usually at my feet, and sometimes, the cat pays me a visit. It’s a misanthrope’s dream.

Unlike some of my work from home colleagues who send me emails at 3 am, I’ve tried to keep to the same work schedule as much as possible since, one day, this little slice of heaven will probably end. I roll out of bed at 8 am, make coffee, take the dog for a walk and get to work. I work through to lunchtime, when I have a reminder set to take the dog for a walk and eat something. Then I work until 3 or 4, sometimes even all the way until 5 pm. Occasionally, like today, I don’t feel like working at all, so I don’t. No one cares. Nobody is keeping track of what I do. As long as I get my work done, that’s enough.

The computer that I was using, while still entirely functional for design, was so old that I couldn’t get to all the websites I need to get to anymore, so I asked my boss if I could bring my work computer home. His answer was, if at all possible, don’t do that. Part of my boss selling his boss on us continuing to work from home was that we’re using our own personal computers for work, which is actually saving his tightwad ass money. If I took my work computer home, that would no longer be true.

Since the Mac tower on which I was working rolled off the Apple assembly line sometime in 2009, it was time to upgrade anyway, so I bought a shiny new MacBook Pro. I got a laptop instead of a desktop so that I could work from anywhere. So far, I’ve only taken it as far as my living room.

Yesterday, I went to lunch with half a dozen coworkers. We kibitzed and ate and I had a generally good time, since the coworkers who attended are the ones I like the most, including my boss, who is one of my favorite coworkers. If he wasn’t my boss, we might actually be friends.

After lunch, I went to a dentist appointment. I left the house at 11:30 and didn’t get home until around 3. I was completely exhausted afterward. I’m so out of practice with interacting with people, going places, and doing things that just a few hours worth left me wiped.

I’m fully vaccinated now. I have been for almost two weeks, yet you’d never know it. My life hasn’t changed much, other than the fact that I no longer wear a mask walking the dog around the neighborhood. It feels so strange not wearing a mask. It feels strange sitting inside a restaurant eating lunch with other humanoids. I’m not sure if we’ll ever entirely get back to the way things were before COVID-19. If nothing else, we’re all a little more wary now and the handshake might be a thing of the past.

I still have COVID-19 anxiety, but it’s a different kind. Nowadays, I’m more worried that things will go back to the way they were. I’m worried that I’ll have to go back to an entirely grey office with no windows for precisely eight hours a day, five days a week. I’ll be annoyed by traffic and wind up with a lot of exhausting fodder for Awkward Moments With Goldfish and Things I Hate. I’ll come to dislike my job again, but be too unmotivated to do anything about it. I’ll have to come up with lame excuses (the dog ate my blog) when I’m not feeling social enough to hang out with friends.

I think we all feel that way to some extent. We’re just poking our noses out of our respective warrens, looking up at the blue sky for the first time in a while, and wondering if we’re up to doing it all again.