Full Circle - March 5

Lots of dark offices

It has now been a full year, to the day, since my last real day "in the office." Saturday, March 6, 2020 was the Red Bluff Century where I crashed and spent a couple of days in the hospital, just in time for the first COVID-19 case to arrive in New Orleans. So basically I got a little head-start on the whole "work from home" thing. Good think I already had a pretty nice home office setup.

Not unexpected!

Coincidentally, I happened to have a routine dermatology appointment down at the Tulane hospital clinic, and since I should now have some measure of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, I figured it would be a good day to go in to the office and at least get my long-abandoned computer back up to speed. I figured it would take a while for it to download and install all of the updates it missed, which it did. 

So I rode over to the office a bit early so I could drop off my stuff before walking over to the hospital, a few blocks away from my Poydras Street office. The building, and certainly my floor, is still pretty deserted. Before walking over to the hospital I had to look up the now-forgotten code for the bathroom. Over at the clinic I got my usual three of four shots of liquid nitrogen and a biopsy sample from something on my back. On the way back I stopped at the Subway to pick up a sandwich for lunch. It was almost noon and there were like two people there. So weird. Anyway, I was back in the office a few minutes later. I think there may be one or two other people on the floor since I've occasionally heard a door close, but I haven't seen anyone, which is actually kind of nice.

At least it was peaceful and quiet!

While my desktop all-in-one was updating I got some work done on my laptop that I'd brought. Fortunately I've been keeping all of my work files in folders on Box, so there were no problems in that regard. The one thing I forgot to bring was the external backup drive that normally is attached to my work computer. I'd gotten Candy to retrieve it from my office way back in March so I'd have access to all of the files that normally live just on my office computer's drive. I've had to use a lot of files that are on there over the past year, so that was definitely a good call. In the meantime, however, those original files on my office computer won't be synced to the backups until I bring the external drive back and get things back to whatever passes for normal.

This morning it was a little bit warmer than it had been for the prior couple of days. I went out and met Gavin, Julia, and later Nisha for the TUCA coffee ride. Julia and Nisha both had to head back before coffee, but anyway it was nice to sit down at one of the tables outside of CC's on Esplanade for a quick cup before heading back home myself. It's looking like rain tonight but at least the low temperatures will be staying in the low 50s for the weekend.