Weekend Plans Post: Thinking About What I’ll Miss

I have slowly and surely moved from “work from home 5 days a week!” to “go into work one day a week” and now I’m in “go to work two days a week” territory.

If everything goes well, fingers crossed, knock wood, we’ll be in a place where we have reached “go into work 4 days a week (and Friday is WFH for everybody, indefinitely)” by the end of the summer.

While there are a ton of things that I will not only say “Goodbye!” but “GOOD RIDDANCE!” to, there are a handful of things that are really, really, really nice about working from home:

1. 1. I make a real breakfast. Like, a breakfast sandwich. A sandwich like this one but one with an everything bagel and jalapeño cream cheese and thick pepper bacon.
   2. Eating breakfast at leisure as I check email and skype messages and seeing how many meetings I’ve got (oh good! only 3!) and enjoying the food as it is still hot.
   3. Making breakfast for Maribou when she gets up (about an hour or so after I do). We bought a couple boxes of cereal at the beginning of all this, thinking we’d need to eat it. Thanks to being able to get bread and eggs and bacon, we have only gone through one box, maybe. That was more due to laziness than necessity.
   4. Baked Potatoes for lunch every Friday. I get up on Friday, make my own breakfast, wash two big bakers, wrap them up in foil still dripping wet, then put all the fixings (butter, shredded cheese blend, sour cream, chives, and bacon, bacon, bacon) on them for lunch. You’d pay $4.99 at Outback for this potato! ($4.49 plus an extra fifty cents for the extra bacon.)
   5. Not commuting. It takes me about a half hour to drive to work (and longer if there is traffic congestion or an accident or something). My day can start leisurely and it can end pretty abruptly when the whistle blows on Friday. Get up, run upstairs, check on Maribou, then go for a jog, and be in the shower in the time it used to take me to drive home.
   6. Cat breaks.

Now I know that I am very lucky to be in a place where there are things I’m going to miss about working from home (as opposed to being terrified about stuff related to not working). I hope that we can all get to a place, soon, where everybody who wants to have a job can find one and everybody who wants to hire someone has to offer better pay, benefits, and bagels on Monday.

I can’t wait to get back to a place where that’s where we all are.

I can’t wait to go back to work and see my co-workers. I can’t wait to argue about daily trivia with them and tell them about what it was like to grow up in the 80’s after they explain to me some crazy hybrid vaping/fidget spinner trick that they saw some K-Pop kids do on TikTok. (“We smoked cigarettes! At the mall!”) I can’t wait to go out to work and think something like “oh, I need a particular ingredient” and just pick it up rather than set up a delivery window. I can’t wait until my Saturday Night Gaming Group can all sit in the same room together again and share snackfood while we talk about longbow damage. I miss going to my climbing gym.

The things I’m going to get back from a life returning to something like “back to normal” are SOOOOO much better than this weird little new normal that showed up with the pandemic.

Like, this weekend, I’m not going to do laundry. We did it on Tuesday. We’ve got a gaming group, but it’s online. (We’re going to try out Cosmic Encounters.) I’m going to play games in the basement… but doing it because there aren’t really that many other options is different than when you’re doing it because you’re avoiding hundreds of other options. It’ll be nice to play games again because I’m avoiding doing real stuff.

In the meantime, though… that’s the plan.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is Tiger, zonked out.)