I’ve been in my home for about two weeks. I’m the grocery person now. I’ve had to go occasionally to the office but never for more then like ten minutes. I’ve been working out of my home office. A little space in our condo where I have all my books and 3D printers and my big old computer. Its cozy in a post apocalyptic hermit kind of way.

My wife has been maximizing the couch. It’s her own little tech support station while she tries to help her students navigate e-learning or home schooling or whatever it is kids are being subjected to that prevents them from mainlining video games all day. I’m not sure what’s preventing me from doing that beyond guilt. So I guess society is still functioning enough for that.

I hosted another D&D session (virtual) for my nephew and his friends, all of whom seemed to be in various states of bottled explosions. I had some adult D&D time over the weekend. We are having our virtual writing group meeting while I write this. Its working out pretty well. I’m pretty amazed at how much video conferencing has improved. I’m also pretty amazed that its taken this event to get us to use it. There’s a lot of things and groups that would have always worked better remote, but we held on to human contact till it literally bit us. Now everything is virtual, and that also kind of sucks.

I can’t remember how many times I asked people not to email me. Just walk over to my cube. Let’s have a face to face discussion. Things get cleared up so much faster and clearer that way. Well that’s over now. Everyone you know is now a voice inside a box on your desk. For real, I honestly wondered if my co-workers weren’t Ferris Bueller’ing me with some of their responses.

So here we are. It’s the third Monday of being in my home, which is also my office. I’m probably putting in more hours now then I did before. No commute is nice. I thought there’d be more video games, but it turns out I’m a pretty diligent employee then I thought. I can’t believe that I’ve been missing out on hugs from my wife at lunch all this time. The wonders and horrors of the modern age are kind of all combining this week. I have to wonder; is this the new normal?

I leave you with a silly video.