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
