The pandemic is over 😷 👾 💉

The muzzles are going away with the president’s announcement, remote work is fizzling away with the hybrid model and in person office days replacing the summer weeks I spent much of last summer up in the woods. While I knew it would have to end at some point, especially after I was vaccinated – it was fun while it lasted.

The summer of 2020 is one for memories many fun but not all great. There was several weeks working from Spectulator and other parts of the Adirondacks, camping in the remote country while either running into town to connect to Wi-Fi or using the Hotspot on my phone. Particularly memorable was Primary Night 2020, working remotely from Horseshoe Lake, followed by climbing Lows Ledge the next evening after work.

Sure it wasn’t all wine and roses. First off in April it was a scary time during the deep lockdown, not knowing how many friends and family I would loose to the virus. Fortunately nobody real close. People were so obnoxious at first, there were the social virtue makers who made it sound like you were murdering babies to get away for a weekend in the Adirondack wilderness. That first weekend camping in the Adirondacks I had to hide from the world I was even heading out of town.

And it was tough personally at first for me as I didn’t have home internet nor really even a good setup to work. And certainly no air conditioning at home. My truck is getting old, and increasingly grones and makes scary noises over the hills and hollows – making me concerned that I could be stranded on my way to and from work in the wilderness. I bought a screen tent for work, had a grease fire and had to patch it.

I ended up getting a laptop from work with a cellular wireless card and later I upgraded my phone plan temporarily to have Hotspot data which worked well. I thought about home internet but I didn’t want to commit as I knew the pandemic would eventually end with a promising vaccine in the works. Working remotely was fun but I tell you that I was always super careful to make sure I was super responsive to colleagues and clients, lest they think I was slacking off in my hammock in the wilderness.

Then the constant management of energy resources – I had upgraded to two batteries and better controls on my truck cap solar set up but I never expected the heavy load of 8 plus hours a day of the laptop plugged in on days not always sunny and with shade in the woods. And constant concerns that a cell tower would drop and ensuring that I was camping in locations with good cell service during work hours and wireless internet at libraries when I needed to do data heavy activities.

Plus it wasn’t fun how work and off-work hours broke down. While there was times in the past when I was on-call, most weekends in the past they were just weekends and I could be totally off-the-grid, not worrying about cell service. But it seemed like the pandemic, work was from home, work was from camp, work was from the lakeside, it was every where. Even when work hours had more boundaries in hours worked, it always seemed like I never was home from work.

My travels were kind of the joke of office meetings on Zoom but things got done and done well. Sometimes from the hammock, sometimes from the table and screen tent and a lot of the time from my truck cab. There was blazing hot summer days and frigid winter days remote working from my truck. Not always comfortable but still always an adventure. But alas this week is the beginning of the end with regular scheduled days in the physical office which are likely to increase in the coming weeks.