1 year in - new dad again and working remotely

I guess I will just start writing about my experience. 

Near the end of April 2019, I jumped back in my previous career so I could work from home and my wife could stay home with our soon to be newborn. Getting offered the position was a dream as I wasn't looking to go back in my career of 20 years. I can share this story at another time.  My current boss offered to let me work remotely as we are 3 hours away from the nearest office. I do go to the office once a month or at least once every 6 weeks. This works out very well. 

I set my office up with a stand up desk which fits my 17" laptop and (2) 23" monitors perfect. I also bought a flexispot cycle as my chair. My office is setup in a spare room on the lower level. This serves as a quiet space to work away from the normal home distractions of the wife, baby and great dane. I do have a dog bed down there so he can come visit when it gets too loud upstairs. 

At first working from home was tough. Getting used to using a headset to talk to coworkers and/or jabber or Microsoft teams etc. Learning to use the mute button while on conference calls. I also blocked my camera until I learned how to turn it off in the setting for calls as I rarely shave and typically only have a t-shirt on, both not acceptable as appropriate work attire. Anyway, after 1 year this is working out great as a family but has its drawbacks. 

Drawback, I'm almost always home along with my wife and daughter. That part sounds great but I really miss interacting with other people. We do not know many people up here. I am the type of person who needs projects to work on. We've been in this house almost 4 years. I'm running out of projects and the projects I start take a lot longer as I work around nap times and I still need play time with our little one. 

There are more drawbacks as well, feeling that you are left out of office talk so you feel like you don't know what's going on or maybe feeling left out.  Both of these, I'm ok with. I'm no longer looking to be the top dog as I reached that pinnacle years ago and further effort equals diminishing returns. 

Enough about work, so my youngest daughter turns 1 in a couple of days. My other daughter turned 24 earlier this year. I also have 2 grandsons I have yet to see. Will get into this later. I sure don't remember over half of this stuff from 24 years ago. I think my wife spends too much time looking up baby stuff as we didn't worry about any of this stuff back then. Of course there wasn't much with the internet back then or maybe there was but it wasn't almost instant like now because of dialup. 

I love our daughter and love seeing her accomplishments. I am still getting use to this. It is not easy. My old go to was always cars as I needed projects to keep me sane. 24 years has taken a toll on my body. Not so much age related just things I've done that have injured myself and now it is affecting me. I do lookup alot of car related projects just dreaming. Sometimes it helps me but sometimes it makes me sad. With me running out of house projects I'm trying this out so hopefully this helps. Maybe at some point I will research writing skills so that my blog will make sense. I say that because my mind literally bounces around so much during the day it is crazy. 

Well this is enough for now.