Good morning everyone, happy Friday.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I will share what it’s been like to work from home this week.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is Laura’s spring break week.  Instead of spending time driving around Ireland or suntanning in Kauai, we are both spending most of our time inside our home.  My work from home set up is upstairs in our guest room / home office and Laura’s work from home set up is downstairs on our den table.  It’s nice that we have our own spaces to work (and listen to music or watch TV).

As an assistant principal, Laura is used to waking up early and leaving early for work.  Now that we are both working from home, we can sleep in a little later, eat breakfast together, and watch morning news before starting our work.  I’m used to eating lunch around 11:30-12pm, so we both take a break, make lunch (or reheat leftovers) and relax for a few minutes.  In the early afternoon, if the weather is nice/decent, we try to go for a 2-3 mile walk around our city to stretch our legs and talk about work and life.  There are not many people outside, but we do see a few others walking and riding bikes.

Earlier this week, San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area counties implemented a shelter in place order where residents are advised to stay home as much as possible, with the exception of grocery shopping, picking up prescriptions, going to the doctor’s office, and getting some fresh air / exercise.  Our refrigerator and pantry are pretty well stocked, so we won’t need to go to the grocery store for the next 7-10 days.

We had a few random restaurant gift cards that we have been holding onto for a few months, so we decided it was time to redeem our Olive Garden, Chili’s, Mary’s Pizza Shack, and Cold Stone Creamery gift cards for some take out food and dessert.  It’s nice to have the ability to order and pick up food to bring home instead of cooking every meal at home.  There are a few other local restaurants that we like to eat at that we will try to support over the coming weeks by placing takeout orders.

This week has gone pretty well and we have a good schedule / system in place for working from home.  I am working from home for the foreseeable future, but I’m not sure what Laura’s job will look like over the next couple weeks since her school is closed for the next few weeks and students are distance learning.  We will make the necessary adjustments and try to focus on life one day at a time.

If the weather is good this weekend, we will try to do some home improvement jobs.  Our schedule includes replacing our carbon monoxide detectors, pulling out weeds, raking leaves, and spreading out more bark in the front and back yard.

I hope this week has gone well for you and I hope you have some fun activities planned for this weekend.  If you want to share your experience from last week or what your plans are this weekend, please leave a comment below.  Have a great weekend everyone!