Adrian cooks dinner with me once a week, but now he wanted to make a meal all on his own.

Pancakes are a great first dish for him. There’s a single stream of obvious tasks to be done. No multi-tasking, no task-switching, no wondering what to do next. And he’s had enough practice that it’s almost impossible to fail: even if some of the pancakes don’t come out perfectly round, they will all taste good.

I’ve been exercising more or less daily during my lunch break recently. I have found a bit of a routine by now and it’s going pretty well. Some days I go out and cycle, some days I do a bit of weight training in the living room.

(You know what else we have a quarantine shortage of, in addition to toilet paper and web cameras? Kettlebells, and other types of weights. I make do with the small 4 kg weights we had at home and think vague thoughts of making my own weights. I have plenty of rocks in the garden, after all.)

Today the weather was so fabulously nice that I moved my weight training outside to the deck. The bushes are all still bare and don’t screen the garden from passers-by so I felt somewhat self-conscious, but the passers-by were few and didn’t notice me.

The cherry trees outside aren’t blossoming yet, but a branch we have in a vase in the kitchen is.

I wouldn’t normally cut a branch just to bring it inside. It feels disrespectful, wasteful. But a few branches were hanging at face height across the path from the front door to the garage, and getting mildly annoying. So I might as well kill two birds with one stone – get rid of the annoyance and bring in some pretty flowers.

tretton37 usually holds regular code lunches in our offices. Now that we can’t do that, we’ve moved our knowledge sharing events online. Today it was my turn to do a talk – a repeat performance of a talk I’ve done before, but this time streamed on YouTube instead of talking to a live audience sitting in front of me.

It felt weird at first to talk to a camera instead of real people, but I got used to it pretty soon. I found a decent setup with all the screens and windows and peripherals, with my presentation notes close to the camera. And I managed to get my talk done within my allocated time, just barely. I do tend to ramble on sometimes.

I noticed afterwards that I wave my arms a lot. When I speak in front of an audience, it feels natural to move around and gesticulate, and I imagine it looks normal. On screen, it seems more distracting. If I do this again, I’ll have to try and tone down the gesticulating.

Here’s my talk about multi-tenant architecture, in case you’re interested.

It feels like summer outside. I cycled in just a tank top today!

It’s Monday and I should be working but the midday sun pulled me out into the garden so I spent an hour shovelling earth and pruning old raspberry stalks instead. Which I should have done last autumn but didn’t. The raspberries got almost no love last year and barely grew. I thought it was nearly impossible to not succeed with raspberries, they’re supposed to grow like weeds, but not these ones. More water and more fertilizer this year, I guess.

One of this year’s garden projects is to replace the planting boxes with strawberries. The boxes themselves are ten years old and nearly rotten through. The soil in them is also full of a particularly unpleasant weed, with thread-thin stalks that break as soon as you try to pull them out, that spreads like crazy. I hope I can get rid of it by replacing all the soil, and lining the new boxes with a higher-quality weed fabric.

I’ve shoveled out all the soil now so the next step is to buy new boxes and new fabric. And then start shoveling again.

Another day with wonderful weather. Adrian and I went out to do some gardening. We bought three bushes to fill some gaps in the planting. I dug holes. Adrian watered things, climbed on things, and took wheelbarrow rides.

Then he found my measuring stick from when I dug the hedge and started making balancing experiments. He balanced the stick on top of the street sign, and experimented with rocks on top of the stick. How far from the middle can he move the rock before the stick is out of balance? That, of course, led to see-saw catapults.

Those electricity cabinets and the street sign next to them are great for climbing on, even if they are a bit of an eyesore. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t choose to put them there. But I’m pretty sure that Adrian would, if he could choose. Just like with the sewer access thing that you can more or less see in this blog post. I found it an eyesore and tried to find ways to hide it; Adrian loved climbing on it, stacking things on top of it, and so on. I’m glad it’s gone; he misses it. In a way I’m glad for his sake that I can’t get rid of the electricity cabinets.

Another old blog post reminds me of the covers I made for the cabinets. Those got vandalized soon after with graffiti and then with a knife, so they got thrown out. Someone keeps spraying graffiti on the cabinets; Eric keeps covering it up with silver-gray spray paint.

It’s taken us a while to eat all the Easter eggs. Hard-boiling is not the most delicious way of serving eggs. But some of them accompanied a cauliflower soup, and some we actually had for breakfast.

After knocking them first, of course. The tournament was won by Stitch, who’s just about to meet the referee here. (Stitch beat him, too.)

This is the best of seasons. Every day, the world gets noticeably greener. Every day, more things are growing and flowering in the garden. It’s a joy to step outside the door. The rose currants here, the white anemones there, and the daffodils in the background… I wish I could take a photo to do it all justice.

I do still miss the office and the daily contact with my colleagues, but now that I’m getting my routines in place, it’s working out better and better, I am even finding new advantages in working from home.

Routines help. I go to “work” at the same time every morning, when Eric and the kids leave for work and school. I put on “work” clothes in the morning, instead of lounging around in the same comfy-but-worn things all day, every day. I take a proper break in the middle of the day for exercise and lunch.

The advantages mostly stem from flexibility. The difficult part is balancing that flexibility against the routine. I can go out for a long walk whenever I want – but because it’s so flexible, I keep thinking that I’ll just finish this little thing and go out later, and the “later” never quite arrives.

Today, though, I made great use of my flexibility and took some self-portraits in my home office at the end of my lunch break. I would feel more than a bit awkward doing that in the office.