Edna? Edna who??? in shiny things

I cannot believe I haven’t made an entry in a year and three months. Now I don’t even know where to start!! Amusingly I am sitting in my office for the first time in… a year and four months. So, related perhaps? It’s not exactly the first time I’ve been back to the office - I had to come in twice last week and this is my second day this week - but we all have to return full-time on Monday. Goodbye to remote working, which I looooooooved. Bizarrely I have nothing to do, which is really ironic since I basically never stopped working while doing it remotely. Suddenly I’m caught up. At least on things that really need to be done. I’ll take this opportunity of sadness over Remote Times being finished to write in my long neglected journal. And to catch up a bit. I’m embarrassed at how behind I am with everyone. Especially those of you who did NOT stop writing for a year and three months.

I am seriously in mourning at the end of working remotely. I always knew I’d like working from home, but didn’t expect it to be so extremely doable. I thought I’d have trouble focusing, and I’d be finding myself doing non-work-related stuff around the house on work time. That never happened, and I recall complaining at the beginning of The Pandemic about being a tad annoyed at how busy I was, while other people seemed to have lots of time to catch up on all their fun stuff. My issue was not taking enough breaks! I used to walk at lunch, in the Before Times, either around town/campus or on the Greenway, but we don’t have a very walkable neighborhood and driving to the Greenway and back from home takes half my lunch hour. So I’d go after work and end up not really taking a proper lunch break. Or I’d work through till four and take lunch then, so I’d be tired and cranky. But OMG I loved being at home! It was quiet, it was peaceful, the cats are great company, Baker B has a room he uses as a study downstairs so despite our house being tiny we had plenty of space. And I admit I loved the lack of interaction with other humans, being such an unsociable creature myself. Work-humans and college students, I mean. It was so.... peaceful. And I could get up SO much later, since all I had to do was feed the cats and throw on some leggings and a fleecy pullover before turning on my computer. I’m a massive night owl so that has been wonderful.

Now we’re back to noise and interruptions. Well, today we’re not, it’s so bizarrely quiet here that I’m wondering if the pandemic suddenly worsened and wiped everyone else out. There is noise outside - the university is doing some massive renovations and tearing down dorms across the street and building a huge new “living complex” where the old dorms were, so that’s kind of annoying, but I’ve only seen one other person in this building all day. That will change drastically on Monday, though, so I’m enjoying it.

We’ve had a tremendous amount of changes in the last year and four months within our college, starting with a new dean - the third one in, I think, five years, and they did not hire the woman who had been our interim for the past two years. Instead they hired someone from a college across the country, and although I’m sure she’ll be fine, we all really liked the interim and were hoping she’d be permanent. We also had a big office-suite renovation, which involved me, Mr. Organized and Miss Tattoo moving way off down the hall, into a little separate suite with five offices, two of which will contain a couple of new in-house advisors that we are getting. The advisors are also a really good thing and will help with our workloads a bit, but also they are new people to get used to and now we’re all kind of crammed in together down here. It’s a teeny zig-zaggy hallway and very little room, although my office is a tiny bit bigger than my old one, I think. My old one was microscopic but the outer wall was floor to ceiling windows, and I really miss them! I still have windows, just half the size. If that. On the plus side, we are away from the main office now so it’s less likely people will be constantly wandering in and interrupting us. The two advisors have the first two offices on the hall, so anyone who does wander in will run into them first.

It’s just weird to be going back to “normal” after Pandemic Times. And Pandemic Times are not over, cases are rising everywhere including here. We’re vaccinated so I’m not overly worried about getting sick myself, but I predict we’re in for a big resurgence, especially when the fall semester starts. The university can’t force people to get vaccinated, and I think everyone who is willing to already has. We’ll see what happens. At least we’ve gotten good at “pivoting”, as the higher-ups say.

And I think this entry is quite long enough after such a long absence! Fingers crossed this will get me going again, since I didn’t even scratch the surface of all that’s happened.