Day 10: back to work, and it's rainy

An administrative note up front: a few of you have had your comments eaten by Substack. I tweeted at them. Sorry that happened! If you have more specifics, please send them to me and I’ll pass them along. They’ve already reached out wanting to know more.

Today was my first day back to work. The 3 hour time different was strange — meetings that I usually have mid-morning were after lunch. And since I don’t have solid Internet, meetings that I usually videoconference in to were audio-only, forcing me to realize how much extra information I’m losing by being the only audio caller.

When the furniture comes I’ll have an office downstairs. Without furniture, this house has a lot of echo, so I can’t work there in my office. I’m camped out in the kids’ bonus room for now, as the carpet keeps the noise down.

It’s very minimalist. Only the essentials.

I had to rejoin Facebook. There are several groups oriented around our development (12 Oaks) and for now it’s the best way to hear about events or find vendors. I’ll still keep the newsletter going to help me practice longer-form writing.

To Facebook’s credit, the platform helped us find a lawn maintenance guy and probably a carpenter to put in some built-ins, so maybe it’s OK as long as I don’t post much or click on ads or interact with Nazi’s…?

We’ve had two nights now in our new house. I call it camping, but it’s not that bad. We have air mattresses, water, showers, A/C, oven and stove. Our stuff is on a train somewhere between Stockton, CA and Winston-Salem, NC. While I’m not excited about the prospect of unloading the 24’ x 10’ x 8’ trailer, my stress level will go down significantly once it’s here and done. I’m still carrying a lot of anxiety around the unload. It needs to be over.

We’re still weeks away from having Internet. The situation hasn’t gone all Lord of the Flies yet; we’ll give it a few more days. The kids were able to download some Netflix and Disney+ shows before we left the hotel, and we’ve been able to bum wifi from the across-the-cul de sac-neighbors (as long as we’re sitting outside on our sidewalk or their porch), but it’s all a stop-gap. The ultimate goal is to have the Ting Internet installed sometime in the next month, which will be the best Internet we’ve ever had by a factor of 10x or so. Until then, I ordered an LTE gateway that should allow us to have some basic Internet. SIM chip comes tomorrow, modem comes on the 18th. The kids don’t know that we might have basic Internet in a few days, though. Underpromised and overdeliver.

I miss cooking! I have an awesome new gas range but only one sauce pan to cook in. Plus, we don’t have our “final fridge” yet… we’re working with a loaner until the manufacturer can work through their backlog on our fancy French door fridge. We’re holding off on the giant Costco/Sam’s run until we have the final fridge, so it’s been fast food or pizza delivery in the meantime. But as someone who uses cooking as a creative release AND finally has a decent kitchen, this shit’s getting old.

Some photos.