When lockdown commenced, my workload increased and for a few weeks there was a lot more email too. Things did settle down to a normal of sorts eventually. I am fortunate that my entire job can be done online and that I have worked from home before. My last couple of years at Gale was spent exclusively working from home though interspersed with visits to the Melbourne office and libraries around Australia and New Zealand. This time round, there are no visits anywhere…other than to the takeaway up the road and brekky on the weekend.

My days have been much the same minus the commute, in fact the commute has transitioned to an extra hour sleeping in. Curiously I am starting work more refreshed both from the increase in sleep and the lack of travelling. This will be hard to give up though I have experimented in the past with going to bed earlier. One thing I found was that regardless of what time I started, I still tended to finish around the same time at the end of the day.

This does mean I haven’t done much beyond what I normally do. I’ve not commenced writing the great Australian novel, nor learnt a new language; I’ve not taken up further study nor undertaken any large projects. Thanks to Ms19 I have taken up roller skating again and I have been walking occasionally.

One project I did take on was organising all my cables and this was a task I’ve been putting off for some years. They’ve primarily been kept in an overflowing milk crate, maybe even some in a second crate. Several years ago I did go through and spool each cable tying them off either with a wire tie or rubber bands. Sadly the rubber bands have not stood the test of time and in many cases were a nasty, sticky mess to clean up. An initial task was to replace all the rubber bands with new ties and clean them. I did get rid of a few cables though I suspect the household had hoped, somewhat optimistically, that I would get rid of a lot more :-)

I ordered a deck of coloured drawers from Officeworks and separated my cables into 5 loose categories: ethernet, power, audio, USB (various types), hardware (including my old Eees). There were a few other odds and ends that ended up in the top couple of drawers eg a couple of HDMI cables have ended up in the top drawer with the ethernet cables as that’s tidier than the drawer with the different types and sizes of audio cables which includes speaker cables, various playstation cables, and sound systems I don’t remember. There’s even several metres of telephone cable which I originally used to run a dial up connection in a terrace house in Newtown with the cable running from the phone port in the loungeroom, up the stairs and through a door into a study space. I suspect I could possibly get rid of that cable at least though remain reluctant…just in case.