work

I don’t think it occurred to me until maybe Sunday that, by working from home last Friday, I was effectively getting myself something like a five-day weekend, since I’d be working from home again today.

Oh sure, I had plenty of work to do — no end to it, in fact — but this was a nice way to ease out of, and then back into, the week.

First thing this morning, the landscaper came to the door, wondering if, instead of the car window repair guy coming here, to the house, I could drive the car over there, to his shop, in East Meadow. I think he was worried about the rain in the forecast, but I really did have a lot of work to get done — my boss is going away starting Thursday, which is also the day I’m in a day-long training session later — and the landscaper had told me on Saturday that it could all be done on-site. So he called the repair guy back, and they got it squared away, and then he gave me cash to pay the guy and said he’d be here around noon.

He was, and it did rain — buckets, in fact, although just before it started we moved the car closer to the garage to keep the front window out of the worst of it. The guy was here maybe an hour, but my car has all its windows again, so that’s what counts.

I also have a mended pair of pants, fixing the rip in them from last week. The job maybe isn’t quite as good, but I think that’s more because of the type of rip (along the pocket) and the quality (in retrospect likely low) of the pants themselves. It’s disappointing, since they’re brand new, but I think they’re wearable for those days when all I do is sit behind my desk. (You know, most of them.)

Amid all of this, I managed somehow to put some kind of finish on the report I spent all Friday (and then some) working on, plus some work on a few other projects. It was, somehow, actually quite a productive day.

Allergies continued today, and I never did finish that report I was working on — I spent much of the morning plugging in the contents of another review that came in overnight — but it was a good day nevertheless.

I had the chance to work from home today, so I’ve gotten an early start on the Labor Day weekend. Enjoy it!

I went into the office today, since my boss gave us the option of using Friday as our work-from-home day this week, to get an early start to the Labor Day weekend. I wasn’t going to pass that opportunity up, even if it was raining when I left the house. It wasn’t raining by the time I reached the city.

I’m actually off tomorrow, partly for a dentist appointment first thing in the morning, partly because I didn’t much feel like going in for half a day after that.

Oh, and I have no idea what the signs in the photo above mean. They were servicing the vending machines in the office today, and, for a short while, I guess that make H₂O-minding necessary.

There were times when today seemed like some kind of Monday Bingo, checking off only the most cliched characteristics of everybody’s least favorite day.

A lousy night’s sleep? Check. An over-crowded subway train? Check. Buckets of rain? Check and check. Oh, and a brand-new pair of pants that I bought just this past Saturday snagged on the arm of my desk chair, just as I got to the office, and ripped quite badly.

Still, it wasn’t such a terrible day. The pants might be fixable, and the rain quit in time for me to grab some lunch, and really, I’ve been on worse subway trains than this. And a phone conversation with a pair of authors — one in Finland, the other in Minnesota — went well, despite a brief technical hiccup.

But still, Monday always seems so determined to prove that it is Monday, that every bad thing you’ve ever heard about it is true. Sometimes I just wish it wouldn’t bother.

An average Friday…but man, was there ever a lot of it. I have to tell you, when you don’t spend the work day playing laser tag and driving go-karts, it just isn’t the same.