April 24, 2006: First Day Working from Home

I slept in a lot later than I had intended to this morning. It was 7:30 by the time that I got out of bed. I had meant to have been up by 6:30 at the very latest. Not that it mattered much. After the long day on Saturday there is very likely to be very little going on at work this morning. Most everyone will be straggling in around 9:00 or so. Maybe later.

It is really awesome to be able to work from home sometimes. I think that this is the first job that I have ever had, except for when I actually worked from a home office but that was different, that allows me to work from home sometimes. High speed Internet access really has made a lot of things possible. Think about the incredible increase in quality of life because of good Internet access. If more companies were progressive about this stuff and more people willing to actually work from home and not just use the concept as a way to not go into work we could really increase productivity while combating rising fuel costs and shortages.

There was quite the thunderstorm going on when I first got up this morning and it went until around 9:00 when the birds starting coming back out. It was really loud and intense but we didn’t lose power at all. I was figuring that we were bound to lose power with how close it was. But not a flicker that I could see and the UPS unit never kicked over so we were probably good.

Today’s big project is to get the curtains hung in the living room so that we can start to use that room. The entire living room is completely empty still except for the two lawn chairs, one little metal stand with a printer on it and the cable “modem” that is sitting on the floor out there because that is the only place where it can be plugged in.

By 9:15 the sun was actually out and Dominica pulled herself out of bed. Oreo, however, decided that the entire bed was his and just stayed there. It was sunny from 9:30 until about 10:15 but then it got really dark and the rain started up again. Weird weather today. It isn’t too cold though. It isn’t warm but not too cold.

Dominica ran out to Panera bread to get us some breakfast. They had the amazing cinnamon crunch bagles that Andy and I got when we were in Pittsburgh a month ago. So she got us half a dozen of those. Boy are those ever good. It was pouring rain the entire time that she was gone but just as she got back the sun came out again and was really bright.

At noon Dominica went out to do some shopping for some much needed furniture for the house. I desperately need to have an office chair. I can only do so much when all I have is a folding chair. It is terrible for my back.

After breakfast Dominica headed back out to go shopping for much needed supplies while I worked. Oreo stayed with me. Min hit a bunch of places and came back in the early afternoon with a new office chair, a book shelf, a small rug for in front of the door so that we don’t track in so many cherry blossoms and a small area rug for the middle of the living room so Oreo has a place to lay. She spent the afternoon assembling things and together we hung the curtains in the living room so that that room can be useful to us. Oreo thought it was great once the sun started to stream in the windows so I moved his pillow out to the living room and he had a blast laying in front of the windows in the sunlight watching all of the neighborhood children playing in the parking lot.

I had some spare time since I was working at home and most of my job today involved coordinating with people via email. So I was able to do some firewall work and my new firewall is completely set up and in place now. That is a relief to have out of the way. It is nice to have the basics set up and working the way that they should.

I was busy working this afternoon so Dominica went out to the Omega Diner at 5:00 to get some take away. She discovered that the Omega is now open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. How awesome is that? I hadn’t realized that before. That is a major point of convenience. Especially when you live in a state where just about nothing is open at night. It is a big deal to be able to get food at night around here. While she was out I did some rearranging in the bedroom to prepare for moving the computer out into the living room. Now that there are curtains we can do that.

Dinner was awesome again. The Omega is really good. It was a huge meal and I have several meals of leftovers that are in the fridge now. I could eat almost all week just on what we didn’t manage to eat from tonight’s dinner!

After dinner I worked for about another hour and then we went out to do some shopping that Dominica wasn’t able to do without me. We went to Barnes and Nobles just to see if there was a convenient way to get there and there actually is. We didn’t stay there for long. Their computer and technology section was pretty lean and very poorly organized. Not surprisingly though as I have found very few Barnes and Nobles that really do a good job with that section. Then we went on to Walmart where we got some necessities like a hammer, screwdriver and a futon. The futon will be our sofa when we are using the living room to watch movies and, more importantly to many of you, it will be the guest bed because tons of people are planning on coming down to visit us down here. My proximity to the two cities makes my apartment an ideal launching pad for seeing the area.

Originally my plan was to go into Manhattan tomorrow to go to a trade show with Hewlett Packard but today ended up being so unproductive that that could easily not happen. If it does I will be going into the city for the first time since I first came down here a month ago. Two days after having gone to Philadelphia. Weird. I should know around mid-day whether or not I am heading downtown for the afternoon. I am hoping that I get to, it should be fun.

It was about 7:45 when we got back to the apartment and Dominica set to buiding furniture. First she built a small bookshelf for the bedroom. That will help a lot because I have been stacking books in the kitchen on the tiny built of counter space that I have and the few DVDs that I have are just scattered about with no place to call home.

A little after 8:00 we settled into the living room and set to building the futon and watching License to Drive. The futon took over two hours to build. The movie was crap. This is one of those late 80’s movies that I always wanted to see when I was younger but somehow never managed to see. Then, as I got older, seeing License to Drive was never a priority and it wasn’t one of those classic movies that everyone has in their collections or that any particular channel shows on television very frequently or, perhaps, ever. So it just fell by the wayside and I never got to see the movie. The movie probably became a much bigger thing in my memory than it should have been because of Billy Ocean’s awesome song “Get outa my dreams… Get into my car” which is the theme song to the movie. In reality it is the only good song in the entire movie and it only plays during the credits. What crap. The movie was mildly entertaining but nothing special and nothing nostalgic.

We didn’t manage to quite complete the futon while watching the movie and it wasn’t quite bedtime yet so we popped in more Remington Steele and watched one episode of that. It wasn’t the best episode ever but it was a lot better than License to Drive. We finished up the futon fairly early on and Dominica broke out the bread pudding from our dinner that we hadn’t been able to finish and we ate that while finishing the show.

With the computer moved into the corner of the living room and the printer stand along the wall and the futon set up the living room is actually starting to look a little bit like a living room. It is still pretty empty but the curtains and throw rug make a huge difference. It is noticeable that Oreo is a lot more comfortable now. We think that he was able to sense that the room was strange and it make him uncomfortable. Now he is perfectly happy to lay on his pillow in the living room while we watch DVDs on the laptop. We are still stuck watching them on the laptop as the desktop doesn’t have a DVD drive in it yet.

We went to bed at 11:00. A little later than I had wanted but not too bad. We got a lot accomplished today and shouldn’t need to spend any more money on furnishings for the apartment for a while. Hopefully now we can just spend time enjoying the apartment or whatever instead of working on it.

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