Tag: work from home

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cat naps and work days

My cats are both curled up sleeping, one on the bed, the other on the back of the chair in the living room. They’re so deeply asleep that they didn’t even move when I went into the kitchen to refill my glass. Must be nice! Especially after they kept waking me up through the night with their antics.

It’s always amusing to me when my 13 year old cat is the one trying to get the 9 year old cat to play. Well, except when this is taking place in and around my bed at 2 in the morning.

Meanwhile, I gave up trying to go back to sleep at around 3:30 am and figured I might as well get up and get some work done.

I’ve been at it since, with a few breaks for things like food and taking pictures of the cats, sitting in meetings, and the like. Meanwhile, they’ve both been curled up into round little balls, snoring.

I’m fortunate to have a job like this. It’s amazing how much more I can accomplish when I don’t have to spend spoons on the commute and interacting with people.

When my work day is over, I think I’ll crack open a bottle of wine and see if I can convince one of the two fuzz monsters to cuddle.

Happy Thursday, Readers. I hope you get cuddles.

Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash (not my cat)

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to office or not to office, I’ll just stay home, thanks

This has been a tough week, and I’m not even really sure why. But the good news is that we have made it to the Friday and there is only about 6.5 work hours between me and the weekend. I’ll admit to a certain amount of anxiousness about this whole “returning to normal” thing that is starting to happen.

To be fair, I really love the whole working from home dynamic, and would not welcome a return to the office even in “normal” times. It suits my agoraphobic, introverted self quite well. But I’ve noticed an increase in bedtime anxiousness, an inability to turn my brain off and put my phone down, almost as if I’m expecting some disaster to befall us while I’m asleep.

I’m happy to have found a company that values me and has no issues with the working from home forever dynamic. There are so many companies out there that treat their employees like high school kids who need to be controlled. Worse even, because even in high school they trust you to do your homework at home.

I get that working from home isn’t for everyone and some people need the daily interaction/schedule to do their best work, but I will never understand why people whose work can be done at home aren’t allowed by so many to do that.

In my experience, I get more done in less time at home than I ever do in the office, and I’m not burning my batteries with the commute and being social, so I have more me left over at the end of the work day.

Another thing I’ve noticed about working from home this last year is that it helps me treat my non-work writing as I treat my job, which means that I have times set aside to do that work, and I don’t see it as eating into my “free time” anymore. I don’t have to choose between writing and all the other things. There is this “this is writing time” and “this is time for other things” dynamic to my entire week, not just Monday through Friday.

It is, however, as I said, Friday. That means another cup of Death Wish Coffee and writing time that is on the horizon. I hope the day is good to you, Readers, and that your weekend is filled with love.

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

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baking and breaking

Here we are at Friday again. I have a lot of work to get to today, and I’ve already been up and working for a few hours. My plans for the weekend aren’t concrete, it will depend on whether work comes in on either Job #2 or one of two freelance editing jobs that I am expecting to come in. But, could include the exciting tasks of laundry, cleaning and building a bookshelf.

If no work comes in I may even get time to write and/or research possible literary agents to query.

I will admit that I am really loving working from home. I love the freedom of it. Wake up at 3am and can’t go back to sleep? I can get up and work without having to go anywhere. Can’t be bothered to get dressed? No worries. Need to do laundry in the middle of the week? Go for it. Want to take a break and bake some bread or start some stew in the crock pot? Sure. I made bread this week, and there will be some beef stew later today.

I have days where I work from four in the morning until nine at night barely taking time to go to the bathroom or eat. I have days where I work a few hours, then do things around the house, then come back and work some more.

I have days where I listen to music on Spotify on my TV so it can come through my surround sound system. I have days where I play vinyl on my record player. I have days where I have documentaries on the TV while I work.

Of course, my taste in documentaries is so all over the map that I think I’ve broken the algorithms on Amazon. Their recommendations are getting a bit bizarre.

I should probably get to the next task on my list. I hope y’all have a great weekend, Readers!

Cover Photo by Nadya Spetnitskaya on Unsplash.

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black lives matter. period.

There seems to be a sense of expectation hanging in the air, at least here for me. Some of that is the fact that after months of unemployment, I will be starting not one new job on Monday, but two! I pretty much won’t have a life here for a while, but neither of them pay what I’m accustomed to and combined they might just let me climb up out of the hole I find myself in financially.

Add to that confirmation that an event I had been looking forward to in August is still happening (at least at this moment…who knows what the future will bring…but it IS in Texas, so…yeah, no idea how that will affect things), and I am cautiously hopeful.

With so much wrong in this country right now, with death and dismay all around us, it feels good to have something to look forward to. But, we have to remember, this pandemic isn’t gone. And, we are sure to see spikes in the numbers going forward, with so many bodies out there protesting, with businesses opening, with so many people just acting as if now that we have a new threat, the old one is gone.

People are still dying of this virus. Which in no way means that I do not support the protests or my black brothers and sisters. I totally understand their choices, because if your choice is a slow, agonizing death or a fight to prevent senseless, violent death? I’d choose the latter every time.

I wish I had what it took to be out there with them, but I’ll be honest, between my agoraphobia and my immuno-compromised system, I break out in a cold sweat just looking at the pictures on my TV.

My new jobs will help me stay home too, since they’re both work from home. It means a lot of stuff I might normally be doing gets put on hold, such as writing. Today and tomorrow might actually be the last few days I have to get words out of my head and down on paper for the next few months.

So I should probably get on that…and make more coffee! Remember, Black Lives Matter. Kindness Matters. Love Matters.