I’m currently holed up in a Starbucks –

Before the pandemic, this used to be the morning routine:

• Wake up at 5am
• Be the first one at Starbucks
• Read, write, play something on Switch, clear the YouTube backlog, do literally anything for about two hours
• Pack up and head back home to officially start the day.

The challenge with working from home is that home is a 1-bedroom condo where all the daytime activity takes place within the twenty-or-so square feet that my desk occupies. It’s been pretty difficult, especially recently as work has gotten incredibly busy, to separate activities that all happen in the same spot. I’ll sit down at the desk intending to open up my personal laptop to do something non-work related, but I end up opening the work laptop instead and log in to answer emails and squash bugs. Or, I’ll leave emails/IMs unanswered during business hours to play Rocksmith on my personal laptop.

The lack of a separate place that a coffee shop provides has particularly aggravated this problem; at a minimum, I’ll never take a work laptop to Starbucks because the work laptops aren’t very portable, so I can get the personal stuff out of the way in advance. Minus the Rocksmithing, that is. Hauling a bass and a DAC and the laptop and all the cables is just too much effort.

We’ve bounced between Covid phases a couple times now; this county has gone from permitting nobody to permitting 50% occupancy to permitting nobody to now permitting 50% capacity in the last few months. I’ve occasionally sat inside during the “yes you can come in and stick around” phases of things, but the comfort level has increased recently with vaccines achieving widespread availability. Now I just have to deal with the self-conscious feeling I get when I sneeze in public and imagine everyone around me thinking I’m infected.