It’s been nearly two months now since Bill and I began working at home exclusively, and over a month since Washington state initially gave residents a stay at home order. As of yesterday, the stay at home order will last until May 31st and then things will begin to reopen slowly in a four-phase process, with an estimated three weeks spent in each phase. Our company is taking a particularly conservative approach to having employees return to the office to work, and right now the earliest we would be going back is September.
Bill and I are incredibly lucky and I am grateful for that every day. Our lives are different of course, but our situation is about as ideal as I think anyone could hope for given the circumstances. Unlike so many, we are able to comfortably work from home and we aren’t worried about money during this time. Our local grocery store offers curbside pickup and so every week I can go online, fill out an order, and then pick a time to go retrieve it. My groceries are loaded into the back of my car for me and I don’t have to worry about walking through stores among people who either aren’t paying attention to or don’t care about social distancing precautions. And since we don’t have kids, we’re able to focus on our busy professional lives and spend our weekends unwinding, without worrying about entertaining (or educating!) small people of our own creation. I’ve seen people online joking about divorce rates going up post-quarantine, but for us the additional time together has brought us closer and strengthened our bond.
I know not everyone I work with is happy to be working remotely full-time, but I have to confess that I’ve come to really appreciate it. I love being able to sleep later, I don’t miss that 5am alarm or the hour or more each way I’d spend in traffic driving back and forth to the office five days a week. Now, instead of getting up before dawn and rushing to get a shower and get on the road before traffic hits its peak, I wake up to the sun and spend the first half hour of my morning working out before I take my shower and log into work for the day. There’s a moment in the mornings, when I’m fresh out of the shower and making my coffee before I check emails, when I always feel calm and accomplished and ready to take on the day. September feels like a long ways away, but I know time will fly by and I know I’ll be sad when I don’t have that moment in the mornings anymore.
Like a lot of people, we are home a lot more than usual now and we’ve been trying to put that extra time to good use. We’ve enjoyed watching movies and discovering new shows together, and we’ve been doing some projects around our condo that we’d intended to get to for ages but never seemed to have the time for. We replaced the light in our dining room, and Bill has been going through the house and changing out all of the outdated-looking brass fixtures for more modern matte black ones. We now have new doorknobs, hinges, and door handles, and it’s amazing how much of a difference those changes make in how the house looks. I love our condo. I’ve lived in some houses I liked a lot, but this place is by far my favorite.
I’ve always loved baking, but I just never seemed to find the time and motivation after a long work week. Now though, I’ve been having a great time trying out different recipes and experiments every weekend, and have produced (and consumed) far more cookies than any person probably should. Thank goodness for those morning workouts!
For the most part I feel like I’m in a really good place mentally amid the chaos of this pandemic. I’ve accepted that it’s a wait-and-see situation and the only thing I can do to be helpful is to follow the stay-at-home orders, so I’m taking that very seriously. I’m trying to stay focused on doing a good job at work, keeping our house clean and comfortable, and enjoying all the good things I have that I’m so grateful for.