I don’t celebrate my birthday. I tell people it’s somewhere in Aries, which it is now. And I was born in 1971. I’m 55.
You’ll notice that I’m still vain enough to let you know about when my birthday is. Who doesn’t like a little attention? I just don’t like actual attention. Please do not sing at me in a restaurant. Please do not make the staff at a restaurant sing at me. Can we just eat our sandwiches quietly and go? And stop trying to make eye contact.
I wish I had something more interesting to update about. I still haven’t done my taxes, but I did buy a mechanical keyboard because the keys on the laptop were getting a little weak. The A was questionable and the C was starting to get weird. This one’s wireless or wired, and I’ve got it sitting in front of my laptop keyboard because of course. I have the same setup upstairs for work.
Actually, that computer is closed so there’s no chance the camera can ever activate, because fortunately I have monitors for the work one. And maybe it’s time to get like a proper desk for the downstairs computer. And maybe a decent monitor or two. And a decent chair for it.
And a new sofa because this one is in sad shape after something-teen years, especially with me using it to use the computer which is sitting on the coffee table (on a box!)
My work setup is now pretty comfortable. It’s only taken years but I have finally gotten things in good places. I still can’t open the laptop, but that’s by design. See above.
I forget how long I’ve been working from home (2018?), but I do know that it’s the start of my 17th year with … the same employment record, I guess? I still work with some of the same people after all that time, either directly or indirectly (we’re not on the same team, but “we’re on the same general project at different stages” kind of thing). In that time we’ve been bought twice and sold once, so the fact that I do still work with/around a lot of the same people is kind of impressive.
Anyhow I’m now updating the same documents with a new name for the fourth time, but at least at each point the new employer has let us keep our service history instead of counting us at year one again. Especially when you do have over 15 years and have that sweet 28 days of vacation.
That has to accrue over the year. And has to be used for everything away from work and just coded differently based on whether it was planned PTO or emergency sick time or jury duty or whatever. And in blocks of 4 hours at a time, so you need to take a half day even if you only need two hours. You can see why hanging on to every minute of PTO is important.
I think technically I’d be able to retire not too far in the future? But realistically I’ll probably working until I’m 75. Maybe by that point I’ll have a fully flexible schedule and as long as I work 40 hours in a specific span, I’m fine. That would be amazing. A nice run of locked-in time, two, maybe 3 days of work. Or even spread out over a whole week! Work in blocks around meetings.
Basically, I would work pretty much any time of the day or night if I could sleep between meetings. Unless you record the meetings and I can listen to them when my brain decides it wants to work. Which is almost always at 3am.
One thing about having had my mom stay here is that the dog got really used to someone being awake downstairs while she (the dog) was in her crate. This means that sometimes if I need to be awake at 3am and doing something downstairs, she generally ignores me or sleeps through it unless I get too noisy or something gets knocked over.
I have not tried typing anything at 3am since I got the mechanical keyboard though, so I may have made a blunder.