Three years ago this week, I grabbed my laptop and peripherals, important documents and a few personal objects and left my office at the corporate headquarters for the last time, turning my home office into a dual-purpose location. One computer and desk remained for my personal + writing work and a second, set at 90° to the first, became my new day-job workstation.
I haven’t been back since. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did return to pack up everything else in my office, especially my second “kangaroo” sit/stand desk adapter. And I have been back for a few in-person meetings, but no more than half a dozen times and all of those have been within the past year. I don’t miss working in a building in the least.
My wife has also been working from home full time, with the exception of a few meetings on campus, so we have established a nice pattern. We’re just down the hall from each other during the daytime, but have our own dedicated offices for work. We always have breakfast together. Occasionally lunch, too, and we always rendezvous for supper. “Every night is date night” became our running joke.
In the early years, all meals were made at home. During some periods when COVID seemed to be easing, we dined out, although mostly outdoors, which is still our preference. We perfected a number of recipes that became standards in our repertoire. Lots of experiments with homemade pizzas, for example. We did the occasional pickup order from nearby restaurants and experimented with Door Dash. Discovered the joy of ordering groceries online to be delivered to the car. Some of the pandemic rule changes in Texas even let us order drinks to go.
We traveled little. My car battery was the first to give up the ghost from disuse during the first year and, later, my wife’s car battery did the same. We rarely ventured more than a few miles from home, other than some trips to the airport to pick up visitors and a couple of trips to our favorite coastal destination last year. We’ve taken exactly one trip out of state, to visit our daughter and her family about a year ago. That was while the mask mandate was still in place, so we felt reasonably safe, although we wouldn’t say we exactly enjoyed flying, but that ship had sailed (to mix a metaphor) well before COVID.
We were very early adopters of the vaccine, thanks to my wife’s work. We got our first jab at the end of Feb 2021 and we’ve kept up with every booster ever since. Neither of us have caught the virus, to the best of our knowledge. Not yet, anyway. It’ll probably happen at some point, but we’re still being careful. Masks when grocery shopping. Dining outside when possible (the weather in 2023 has been like a roller coaster—I’ve switched between heat and A/C more times than I can count. After a couple of weeks in the eighties, we’re back down to overnight temps in the thirties and forties.
Time does sail on by, doesn’t it? I can’t believe this is my first blog entry of 2023. What have I seen lately? Our most recent film was Living, starring Bill Nighy, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a civil servant who gets bad news and decides to make some changes in his life. It’s a remake of a Kurosawa movie. I also watched Luther: The Fallen Sun, which has a rather pell-mell plot with some gaps but even so-so Luther is great viewing. I also saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a brutal look at trench warfare from the German perspective. David K. Harbour was a hoot in We Have a Ghost, which was much better than I thought it would be based on the trailer. And I quite liked Don’t Worry Darling, which unfortunately suffered from some bad PR.
We loved, loved, loved the first season of Poker Face, and have been known to utter “bullshit” more frequently than in the past. It just kept getting better and better with each episode. I’ve also been binging Columbo and am now caught up to the episodes from the 1990s, which I remember less clearly than most of the earlier ones, ironically. I just discovered that two of those later shows were adaptations of Ed McBain novels. The one I saw recently, “No Time to Die,” is the most un-Columbo of all. Not a murder in sight and Columbo never meets the perp. We’ve been enjoying Dear Edward, which gives us lots to talk about concerning some unwise choices by many of the characters. I also binged through Enemi Public, a Belgian series about a serial killer who is paroled to a monastery in a small town. We’re enjoying the final season of Picard and the new season of Call the Midwife. I also really enjoyed The Last of Us, although I wasn’t at all familiar with the game. I’m also hanging in with the new Night Court, which is still finding its footing. Mostly funny, but occasionally not.
I was reading John Irving’s The Last Chairlift, but I put it aside (it’s 900-ish pages) to read And Then There Were None for the first time in ages (I wanted to study how she handled the book’s viewpoint for something I’m working on) and then decided to jump into Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. I’ll go back to the Irving at some point, but it is a bit of a slog. Another big book was The Deluge by Stephen Markley, which had some interesting characters and a lot of scary material about climate disasters. I’m reading Fairy Tale to my wife each evening—we have about 150 pages left to go.
Recent and forthcoming short fiction publications:
- “Life Saver” in Still of Winter
- “A Girl and Her Dog” in Shortwave Magazine
- “Sunny Pines” — a round-robin novella to which I contributed a chapter.
- “Crocodile Tears” in More Groovy Gumshoes
Plus I wrote the introduction to the Centipede Press edition of The Long Walk, which was a great honor. It’s a gorgeous book.
Recent interviews:
- The Cemetery Dance Interview: Bev Vincent Revisited (March 17, 2023)
- Constant Writers (February 22, 2023)
- Dark Bites (January 20, 2023)
