Now. Today. Lockdown day 25. COVID Lockdown.

While the state, regional or national lockdown has only been in place for 25 days, I've been at home for 35 days now.  I took some PTO over Spring Break before thee lockdown orders came from the KC Metro area, then the State of Kansas, then the Federal advisory.  Kansas has extended this another 16 days, until 3-May-2020.  51 days home for me.  I think that's a record; at least in the last few years on this new team that emphasizes time in office.  Even before this team, when I was working as a business analyst or on the Social / Community team, I'd go in to the office 1 or 2 days a week for a few hours.  I haven't seen my desk since March 13th.

So, how am I holding up right here, right now?  Fair.  Touchier than usual.  Trying to learn how to be pleasant to people. Relatively low ebb - lots to do, merger completed, no idea who the new teams are.  Focusing on building up my workspace here at the house; upgrading computers, getting a big monitor, etc.  Keeping the same schedule - 8 to 9PM bedtime with an hour of reading or so, 6 to 7AM getup with the dog.  SamTheDog seems to know when the alarm is going to go off and *whuffs* outside my door about 5 minutes before the alarm.  Nice way to start the day.

SamTheDog wondering when I'll get off the computer and take him outside!

Stats break:

• This is the most I've updated and published to this blog, in, well, ever.
• I have 1,026 published posts since 2005.
• Yes, this blog has been going for 15 years.
• I have over 141,000 pageviews.
• I have two followers.
• Most traffic comes from Google searches.
• The most popular post is how to unwedge your Plantronics Headset.
• The most recent popular post is how to unwedge your Asus RT-AC68U WiFi Router.

Site Updates:

• I just added a subscribe by email to get notified of new posts.
• I also added an RSS block at the bottom of the page.
• And I updated the header text shown on every page. 

At least I have plenty of time to tweak this.

Health and Wellness:

Yeah, I should have been updating this bit.  Physically - OK.  Tired, vaguely achy, frequent headaches. Stress, allergies and being very sedentary can certainly account for that.  We found on the County website there are 6 to 8 confirmed cases in our zipcode of COVID-19.  Not a huge threat to speak of, and hopefully, they are quarantining themselves well.  Mentally?  Low tide.  Lots to do for work, unsure of priorities, team structure, etc.  Lots to do at home, but it's bitter cold out right now, so outside projects have to wait.  Inside, everyone but me is living on a 3rd shift schedule (bed by 4AM, up my 4PM.)  So it's a quiet time in the house all day, every day. Minor depression; if I start moving more that should resolve.  Minor anxiety.  Significant movement (bicycling, long walks, motorcycle rides) would help with that, but again, bitter cold out today.

Enough for now. Work call at 10AM and 11AM. Need to be sure I have the work rig set up and connected.

(Never got back to this to publish it. So, 6:30 Saturday Sunday morning we're going to wrap Friday's blog post.)

- Will England