I'm back, baby!

Wordle 382 5/6

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Oh come on. I actually thought of the fifth word before the fourth, but didn't guess it because it seemed objectively worse!

Writing most of this Tuesday afternoon...

Getting up in the morning was easier than I expected, given that I slept badly and most going to the office for the first time in a while sounds daunting. Packing was harder than usual but that wasn't really a surprise since I hadn't done it in two years. I left right on time. This would be unfeasible if the kid was around.

The commute was a bit better than I remember overall but it's hard to say. I appreciated a new bike lane. Unfortunately it's already old enough that a stretch is damaged by construction. I don't mean trucks parked in it or whatever; I mean, the bike markings on it are illegible, and the flexible posts intended to keep cars out of it have been moved to the middle of the bike lane itself. I guess to give trucks going in and out of a certain building more room?

In the morning, shortly after cleaning up and dropping my stuff in the office, I got coffee at the coffee shop on the corner (and an apple strudel, an indulgence). I'm glad it's still there. Then I went up to the third floor to sign in at office's front desk, a post-pandemic rule, apparently needed to keep track of people since they're around so unpredictably. Then, settling in. 

Work has been fine. Minor technical difficulties on computers and phones I haven't used in a while. Having two monitors is awesome. (Maybe I need a better setup at home, but it would be no easier now than two years ago.) 

In between sending emails and editing a document, I explored the building a bit. The third floor was quiet. At most every fourth cubicle occupied and the people there didn't seem to be working too hard. At 1 PM on a Tuesday it looked like I'd expect at 4 PM on a Friday. That feels far more normal than the basement where I was, though, which was not merely quiet but fucking creepy. There are still signs on the cubicles with the name of the old contract on them, which ended a month after the pandemic started. I saw just enough people to reassure me that it was safe to be here. I didn't know any of them. When I walked through the old contract's main room, I saw no people. Some cubicles were not equipped for use, while others looked like they might have been occupied the day before, but a few... I found one cubicle with a newspaper in it, dated, not last week or just before the pandemic, but September 10, 2018. I found one with a network diagram poster on the wall that would look useful and relevant to the work we do if it wasn't upside down. What Lovecraftian nightmare did I stumble into? 

Lunch was pizza from a cafe around the corner. I resisted the urge to have even more junk food there. Maybe Thursday. 

I started the day at the computer that had been mine in the old days. I found that its phone wasn't working so I moved to another one, partly for the phone, partly for the better vantage point. Not that I have any reason to worry about people looking over my shoulder... 

As for how I used my time, my performance was average at best. I started out with a to-do list partly related to being in the office but mostly just existing tasks I hadn't got around to last week. Of seven items on it (not that they all represent the same time commitment, difficulty, or importance, but anyway), I finished four and made real progress on a fifth. Can't complain too much I guess. But I still found a lot of downtime for this and certain other Web sites... 

On the way home I got NyQuil and DayQuil. T. still wasn't feeling well and we were low on them at home, and/or they were expired. For dinner we had spaghetti and the leftover salad - easy enough. Watched a little TV and then T. was in bed by 9.