kareina

I have been working from home for the past couple of weeks, and the first handful of days I was very, very productive and worked longish hours, but yesterday and the day before I accomplished more in the kitchen in the way of making yummy things to eat than I did at the computer doing uni work. Late last night it occurred to me that I really ought to bring my computer into the office and let it do a backup onto the H drive (I don't try that from home anymore, not since the LTU-sync program was discovered to be deleting files on my hard drive if it lost internet connection when it was meant to be syncing my data between the two drives), so I resolved to head in this morning.

It turned out to be a good day to be in the office, since the first email of the morning was from the financial dept of admin, letting me know that in addition to the scanned receipts I had turned in with the travel paperwork on the on-line expense report form that they also needed the original paper copies of the receipts, and could I please print the accompanying form and turn it all in to the "travel expenses" mailbox? So I did that straight away, and then finally got around to gathering up the samples I have been meaning to send off to become thin sections and gave them to my colleague (who was one of the few other people int he building, since most folk are already doing their summer vacation) so she could add hers and ship them off to Vancouver, BC, Canada (why there isn't some company that provides that service at a comparable price/quality of work closer I don't know, but I am told that this is the best option available).

I then spent the rest of the day happily working and was very productive. While cycling home it occurred to me that I am pretty much always most productive the first few days I switch which location I am working. I was pretty much useless the last few days I worked at the office, and then did lots when I switched to working at home, and now I was very productive today, and largely useless the last couple of days working from home. I have never thought of it that way before, but casting my mind further back, I suspect that the pattern holds, and I wonder if it has something to do with having spent so much of my life moving to new locations--there is nothing like moving to make me really keen to DO stuff (though in that case the *stuff* I am keen to do is "moving in". I will have to keep a watch for it, and make a point of switching between the office and working from home sooner--if I have even a slack afternoon at one I should try the other the next day, and see if that causes an overall increase in productivity levels.

Progress on the yard continues. We saw our neighbour with the huge tractor today, he had forgotten that we had asked him if he could bring us a load of gravel, but this time he has discussed with us what we want it for and we also got his phone number (and I finally learned his name!), so with luck he will bring it over soon, so that we can return to work on the root cellar in progress. (We want to put gravel on the bottom, add a floor and build the walls, put gravel between the walls and the earth, and then put on a roof and bury the lot under a small hill.) So, in the meantime, while we wait for the gravel, lord_kjar has been using the tractor to clear away some brush and add terraces to the other part of the hill. When he gets those terraces nice and flat we will put rock walls on the edge of them, and then (next summer) we will put in raised beds for garden in that area, and build a bench seat around the tree that defines the edge of what will be the terraced garden area.

But doing tractor work is pretty much a single person job, so while he did that today I started the process of removing the paving stones from our walkway, so that we can put in a new, better, walkway where we think one actually belongs (the old one is too near the house, and has a weird jog in it, both of which makes it awkward to shovel in the winter). In the process of removing the paving stones I discovered the heart of an ant city, and learned that piles of ant eggs are kind of gross to look at, especially with all of the crawling normal looking ants and crawling bigger things with white wings hurrying everywhere over the pile when they are uncovered. Ewwww.

Normally I am not the kind of person who sees a need to kill over territorial disputes, but I am totally in favour of both abortion and birth control. Therefore I was very willing to take shovelfuls of eggs and their care-tenders across the yard and scatter them in the area behind the sheds where lord_kjar has dug away the topsoil with the tractor (as part of the project to change the slope of the yard, so that the low places which had collected huge standing puddles at every rain when we moved in will have somewhere to drain to, and so we can walk across the yard without tramping through puddles during the wet time of year).

I do not know enough about the life cycle of ants to have any idea if doing this means that those eggs won't hatch and/or won't survive if they do, but I am totally in favour of any species which is so overpopulated as to require cities to cut back on their breeding till there aren't nearly so many of them, so I am not particularly troubled if that generation of ants doesn't make it. If they do survive, however, I hope that they do so because they move their city away from the house--we don't want their scouts coming inside looking for food (not that we ever leave tempting food out--we keep everything sealed in glass jars)