Quarantine Day 59. This entry started to take forever to write.
Because it was May 15, halfway through May, I thought I’d take the opportunity to start reviewing my goals for this year.
Well, that’s still in progress and as I’m writing this, wrapping up this entry has been supremely delayed.
So what happened on this day?
In a nutshell: not too much. (What else is new?) But here’re the highlights:
- I attended a bunch of meetings. My typical Friday (along with Mondays and Wednesdays, and often Tuesdays) are like this now more than ever. In a way, I guess being invited to more meetings (as opposed to inviting myself to said meetings), and especially meetings that I run, means that people find value in having me there?
- The first meeting of the day was the second deep dive, for another product in my team’s portfolio. I presented during the first deep dive on Monday. I didn’t need to present during this one (though a couple of my slides were reused).
I mention this meeting because I’ve been wondering why my boss decided to put my project first. I hope it’s because she wanted to create a good first impression of our broader team! - Another notable meeting was the weekly team meeting that I now facilitate. Previously, I informally set the agenda and kept the meeting moving along. But I didn’t “officially” fill that role; in fact, my project had a lead who I guess (?) was supposed to do this.
But that lead left. Then my boss explicitly asked me if I wanted to be a scrummaster. So now here I am. On that note, I actually quite like being a scrummaster — I’m not quite sure why many people don’t. I guess perhaps I do enjoy admin work? As long as it’s balanced with my technical work.
On a related note, one of my coworkers in my team told other colleagues during lunch that I’d make a great technical manager. That made me feel good. 🙂 - Other than work, I decided that I needed to start overhauling my apartment (again). Or at least my work area. One question that’s been on my mind the past two months has been how to spend my use-it-or-lose-it $250 work-from-home stipend. At first I thought I might want to try expensing a bidet (for real). But I finally decided on getting an ultrawide monitor.
That monitor finally arrived today. It’s changing my life already. Upgrading to a 4K screen last year was pretty awesome. But I’d have to say that “upgrading” to an ultrawide — even though it has a million less pixels than a 4K — is revolutionary. Of course, as I unboxed it, I didn’t know how life-changing it was going to be. But I had a sense. Now that I’ve started working on it (alongside yet another monitor), I’m wondering why I didn’t get one earlier (spoiler: they’ve been too expensive until recently). I don’t think I’ve ever had this much screen real estate at one time on a single machine before!!!
Anyways, while I set up the monitor, I thought that I should finally start another round of reorganizing my apartment… so it begins.
