Back to work

Hi ho, Hi ho. And other disappointments.

And transitioning from summer to fall, which I usually quite like but somehow keep getting fooled by this year. Like I’ll choose a piece of clothing from a drawer, and then put it back, thinking that it’s not fall enough to wear whatever it is, fleece, sweater, leggings … and then remember wait, it is fall, it’s late September, it’s just that it’s too hot. Chilly in the AM, over 80° by night. Blame climate change, I guess.

So, now that it’s almost the end of September, I am fully on my new remote schedule, work at work Mon.-Weds., and from home Thursday & Friday. I asked for Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday in the office, but I think too many other people wanted Mondays from home, so I ended up with Mon.-Weds.

There’s been a lot of angst on campus about the new remote work agreements & policy, that it’s all too restrictive, but the first week I was supposed to be in the office, I did WFH on Monday because the campus WiFi was unstable and the wired connection hadn’t been working in my office throughout pandemic (turned out to be a just bad USB Ethernet connector). Anyways, nothing awful happened, I didn’t get reprimanded or fired for working at home on a contracted to be in the office day. I worked at home Monday, came in on Tuesday, met up with the tech guys, and they fixed it.

I’d been wondering how my volunteer gig setting up the food pantry on Tuesday mornings was going to work out with my new schedule that includes teaching in-person class on Tuesday afternoons at 1:30. If I ride my bike out to Goodman the way I’ve been doing in the summer, I don’t get to work until like 11:00, plus I have to take work clothes and my computer and etc. and can’t leave them in the panniers on my bike. So I guess Tuesdays will be my day to drive. Which I would be doing when it gets cold, anyways. And I now have my flex parking spot under the building where I work, which seems almost too slick and cushy – and old lady-like – I can pull into the quiet, clean garage, park, pay with the app, and take the elevator up and never go outside.

Along with the weather, life at this time of year is inevitably full of disappointments. It’s the 4th week of classes, and the excitement I felt back in August about updating classes, “oh, that’s a good reading to replace this old thing”, “this is an assignment that will work”, is evaporating in the face of the reality of simply keeping up and apathetic and shell-shocked (read “pandemic” for shell) students. There’s recent dumbass behavior on my part that I am almost over now. The bagels I bought at Gotham yesterday using their by my lights, quite satisfactory online ordering system seemed on the hard side when I got them home, extra disappointing at almost $10 for 6 bagels, including fees & tip. And the satisfaction I felt at laying in lots of corn and tomatoes, the freezer full of corn, corn cob broth, and diced tomatoes and sauces and salsa, is somewhat diluted by these disappointing blueberry bars I made on Wednesday that used up my entire stash of frozen blueberries, and I didn’t freeze more for this winter back in blueberry season, thinking I had a ton. The filling was too runny for the crust, that was too hard for the filling. The recipe wanted you to start with six cups of frozen berries, and boil them down to 2 1/2 cups, and was completely non-specific about long that would take; I estimate at least an hour, which I didn’t have. I also didn’t have 6 cups of berries, only about 4, so I stupidly cut back on the cornstarch, and my boiled down 2 1/2 cups filling was way too runny.

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Of course, I don’t want to imply that life’s completely a drag, although I’m definitely not the optimist in the family, that would be my brother, and Mark’s pretty good too, although he did have a significant birthday yesterday and does let his cranky old man overpower his optimist from time to time.

I am in the process of taking off the last 2 Fridays in September and first two in October, the first one for Corey & Hannah’s wedding (see dumbass, above), and the latter 3 to go to symphony concerts and the opera in Chicago.

CSO Friday was a quite satisfactory trip – no kids could meet us for drinks or coffee, so we went straight to Dollop, where the coffee is still as good as ever. The bakery at Dollop was pretty sold out, and the Do-Rite near Daley Plaza seems to maybe be closed for good (it still shows up on Google Maps, but not on the website), so we went to the one on Wacker, which turned out to be in the food court at the Willis Tower, which was actually quite OK for pandemic dining. Upscale, as I said to Mark when we left, “I mean it’s a food court, but it’s Do-Rite and Rick Bayless, not Dunkin & Taco Bell”. The reduced, guaranteed to be less than 90 minutes, program was fun; two composers of color: Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Florence Price, followed by Beethoven, continuing the interrupted birthday celebration that every symphony in the country started before pandemic. We caught an earlier train than we thought, and were home by 7:00, even though the drive from Harvard to Madison was a bit rainy.

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And Mark’s birthday was fun, we had Fairchild’s duck dinner for two, and I made apple pie. The duck dinner has to be the best fancy restaurant carry out we’ve had during pandemic, and easily fed three. The disappointment with the pie is that it was a little runny when we cut it last night, but is setting up nicely now. And my bike had a flat when I took it down to go get the meal, but that ain’t the dinner’s fault, keeping it out of the disappointment column, too.