Interesting Challenges

I've worked from home before in small bursts, but not to the scale that I'm currently having to do, as I'm sure you're experiencing as well.  It's posing some interesting challenges, especially with pets and kids at home.  Kira's doing amazingly great with us all being at home. She's busy with school and her room has been the cleanest I think it's ever been. She's running a couple of miles on the treadmill every other day and keeping herself occupied.  The cat is a different story.  Our home office is the cat's territory and both my husband and I have invaded it. Today, he let me know his displeasure by climbing on the desk, sitting on my planner and then walking over to my husband's space and batting things across the table.  He's done with this arrangement and there's no end in sight for the humans.

Another interesting challenge is I can't print from home and I had to scan something with my iPhone today.  If you are wearing Ugg slippers, you really must be careful to not get the Ugg slippers in your scanned photo. When I opened the finished document, I burst out laughing-clearing on display at the bottom of my document were my feet in my grey fleece Uggs.  I now use the HP Smart app to scan and no-one is the wiser that I'm wearing slippers while doing so!

I'm still dressing up for work. It's still casual, but not at the PJ/bathrobe level.  I find I feel better with what's going on keeping this small level of normalcy to my day.  I will tell you, I ditch the shoes and wear my slippers because I'm not that crazy.

Stay healthy!
Smiles!

Lori

Some Level of Normalcy

I do realize fashion isn't important right now, but I'm doing this just to lend some kind of normalcy to my world.  I felt so much better dressing up, putting shoes on and "going to work" yesterday.  It was almost (almost) like a normal work day.

After work last night, I went outside to get food out of the freezer in our garage and I heard a loud POP that sounded like a cross between a shot gun going off an an explosion.  The birds in the trees went flying into the sky like you see in a movie and all I thought was, "Great, so now it's come to this.  On top of food and toilet paper shortages, we should have bought the damn gun." I grab food out of the freezer, walk into the house and Dave is on the phone, looks at me and says, "We just lost power."

Oh crap. The time to lose power is not when there's food shortages and you have a fridge full of emergency food.  None of us were considering a power outage, so our phone charges were down to almost nothing and none of us were willing to crack into the emergency peanut butter, so out of the house we went to find a restaurant.

Ohio is under a "Stay at home" order, which is sort of a shelter in place order, but not as stringent. Right now, restaurants are allowed to be open for carry out only, though a lot of them are shutting down because they cannot afford to remain open.  We plugged the phones into the myriad of USB ports in my car and off we went to Piada.  Freaky thing in the stores/restaurants are the 6 feet masking tape markings, signs warning you not to go across lines or get too close to people and everyone is really staying away from each other.  Not to mention, you feel icky when you go out of your house and I am a little OCD on touching public door handles.  So we grab our food, take it home to eat and dine by candle light.

We discovered Kira has better survival instincts than us. She found the flashlights and everything else in the house that lit up for some form of light source.  Kira also owns all the candles in the house.

Before it got too dark outside, I turned all the lights on in our bedroom and bathroom so that when the power came on overnight, it would wake me up. Sure enough, 1:00 a.m., power came back on and up I went. I checked the food and it was still cold, though Dave pitched the dairy and meat he and Kira would have consumed out of an "abundance of caution." As a side note, who is sick of that phrase,
"Out of an abundance of caution"?

So today, I did not dress up, I've been feeling a little salty all day and I wore sweat pants.  Tomorrow I'll dress up and hopefully tonight is less eventful!

I scored some Halo Top ice cream before it all sold out! This is getting me through the day.

I spend the day with headphones on.  Apple Music has some cool stations I did not know existed.

My new co-workers are a happy lot!

Stay healthy!
Smiles!

Lori

Hello from Isolation

Wow 2020, you are certainly starting with a wicked punch.  Like you, so much of my family's world has changed in the past 2 weeks.  We started the month complaining about soccer travel and the loss of our weekends and we're ending the month worried about our health, and the health of our friends, family and quite frankly the entire world.  We've went from wondering when Spring will come to worrying about social distancing.  And what the hell is up with the toilet paper?  Working from home was a rare event and now my entire company is working from home and we're learning how to work differently with one another.   Thankfully we have that option and still have jobs.  Fears of what the stock market volatility means for my ongoing employment, fears of a global economic collapse and fears that one of us or all of us will get horribly sick and may die have stressed me out and my anxiety is at an all time high.  So what do I need?  Distraction.  And this is how I'm going to distract myself.

I stopped blogging because I have an extremely demanding job.  I am starting it back up because now I've got plenty of time as there's no place to really go outside of shopping for basic necessities.

I'm through my first full week working from home and day one was a nice change of pace.  Making sure everything was set up in my new office environment was kind of fun.  Seeing what layout I worked most efficiently in and since I only have one monitor that I took home, I'm using my Mac as a second screen if I need to research stuff online.   It's been a bumpy week, but I'm starting to settle in.  I am a bit of a workaholic, so I had to make a distinct split between work space and home space, so when I'm done for the day, I shut the light off in the office and walk away.  It's my drive home from work, it just takes a lot less time now.

And for the first few days, this is pretty much how I looked.  My husband is sharing the same office with me and we are getting used to each other's work styles.  We both are in a lot of meetings throughout the day, so we're literally living in each other's worlds that two weeks ago, we only talked about occasionally.  I've heard his team meetings, he's heard mine. It's weird.  I've conducted meetings walking on the treadmill and it's been warmer here this week, so I've taken conference calls walking around the block. New current reality is way different than the old and I wear headphones most of the day.

Day three of remote work, I woke up and thought, "Why shower?" and then it hit me.  What the hell am I doing?  There has to be some sort of normalcy to all this.  So I got up, showered and started dressing up. Here's day 1.  I'm not wearing earrings because they bug me with the headphones, but I did introduce color back. Next week, I plan on actually planning out outfits and dressing up for fun.

My daughter is 16 now. She turned 16 during this nightmare and unfortunately, her drivers license test, which was scheduled for today, got canceled because the Governor shut all but 5 of our BMVs down to try to slow down the curve of this pandemic.  I feel bad for her.  Her sweet sixteen has sucked.  I ride along in the back of her car a lot with my husband in front with her and I take many selfies to distract myself from her driving.

And the weirdest thing of all. We went to Chipotle tonight because I expect the restaurants will get completely shut down at some point in the near future.  Chipotle has 6 foot marks on the floor so you know where to stand to maintain appropriate social distancing.

We will come out of this eventually.  We will rebuild.  We will survive. And when I tell my grandkids someday about the pandemic of 2020, I want to have evidence of just how fast our world changed and just how thankful you should be for what you have.

Stay healthy!
Smiles
Lori

Whoa Nelly!

Smiles!
Lori

Farewell Mr. Kitty

We lost our beloved Mr. Kitty unexpectedly last week.  We knew when we adopted him that he had a bad heart and our vet warned us that it was a ticking time bomb which would eventually result in his sudden death.  I just didn't think it would be last Tuesday. 

We came home from work/school and couldn't find the cat.  We hunted all over the place and the longer it went on, the more concerned I became.  Dave came home and found him huddled behind the TV set, alive, but not looking so hot.  Dave pulled him out and sat him on the ground where we discovered his hind quarters were paralyzed.  At this point, we knew it was bad and Kira was hysterical as we packed him in his carrier and headed to the emergency vet.   They immediately began triage work on him and put us in a room to talk to talk to the vet. Unfortunately, it was as we feared.  His heart threw off a clot paralyzing the back half of his body, his overall body temperature was low and the back part of his body was cold.  He was in immense pain and the prognosis was grim.  We had an emergency family meeting and decided it was not fair to Mr. Kitty to prolong his suffering and made the agonizing decision to euthanize him.   It was horrible.  The vet brought him to us to say goodbye and after hugging and kissing him one final time, Kira and I left the room and Dave stayed while they did the procedure.  Kira couldn't handle being with him when he passed.

We gave Mr. Kitty a good home for the remaining year and a half of his life and he gave us much love in return.  While I hate that Kira had to go through this, it has taught her that sometimes the right thing to do is really hard, but you should do it anyway.  It taught her compassion and selflessness.  It taught her that it only really hurts when you truly love. 

Mr. Kitty was an incredibly loving animal who got a raw deal in life.  He's in a better place and my Dad is taking care of him now.

Sigh

Before I started my new job, we converted our formal living room into an office.  I was insistent on having real wood desks up here, so we purchased a modular wood office desk system from Pottery Barn.  The debacle on getting the furniture delivered is a story for another day, but I rarely get to sit at my desk because my darling daughter has taken it over.  Tonight, I sat down to upload pictures and she has permanent inked tiny little dots all over my table top.  If she were home right now, I would be lecturing her on being respectful of other people's property, but sadly she is at camp this week, so the lecture will have to wait until next weekend.  Lucky her...I will have calmed down by then.

Smiles!
Lori