Definitely working from home!

So no sooner after that last post we were told on the Monday evening that we are to be on lockdown from our homes as mentioned by the government on the news. So that pretty much answered the question after that day.

So a week on I've been gloriously working from the comfort of my home without the hassle of being in the open office environment. It's not perfect working from home as there's disturbances from the family but not enough to stop my work completely, plus my workload still isn't heavy so I'm able to still get things complete by the end of the day.

I just hope that this doesn't change too drastically for our workload, I hope we never get asked to do anything else in terms of physically going somewhere. But being at home is nice, it feels no different than any other time when I'm at home. There's still loads to do. I envy those people who manage to have time on their hands to get other stuff done and manage to play games for hours on end. I really miss those type of days.

This is also very early news which I guess I shouldn't say but I'll add it anyway - we found out last night that Sofia is pregnant! So that's baby no.2 most likely due by the end of the year. As much as it's fantastic news there's a few factor's that are on my mind:-

1. When this virus situation will "settle"
2. When we can sell the house - at the moment that's not going to change anytime soon.
3. What will everything be like by the end of the year.

It's going to be horrible if the newborn is born whilst this virus is severe or what the severity will be by then. But I'm pleased this still happened, we wanted a baby this year and hopefully the delay of the outbreak won't hinder too much. I just pray that everything turns out well for all of us!

When to work from home and when not to?

So the general consensus at the moment is recommending people to work from home where possible. My department however seem to have this thing where we still need to come in where possible. It's a very weird thing being part of the NHS - there's this current ordeal where we may or may not be classed as "key workers". It basically means any involvement we have for Covid-19 cases which in our case are mainly the clinic builds we do and home accounts etc.

There's only 4 of us in the office today, I know this is all life threatening but I don't feel I have a choice in some situations. The idea is that we could be needed whenever depending on departments and emergencies etc. But we're so computer-bound so it seems stupid. I can't imagine what we would need to do if we're around, we can still do stuff remotely regardless if we need to do with with other teams. We need to keep our distance from people anyway.

I also feel bad when you tell people that you're still going to work when they know themselves what the risks are yet your managers still want you around. It makes me feel conflicted. My plan though is to do at least once or twice in a week. I plan to still be in tomorrow and then stay at home for the remainder of my 2 days of my working days.

I have absolutely no enthusiasm to work though, when it's empty I just want to take advantage of the situation and do what I like doing best such as now with blogging. It never seems to matter whether I'm at work or at home, I can't help but procrastinate. I spend most of my working expenditure in the afternoon, especially when I know it doesn't take long. As much as I love home working it's not homely enough for me to feel comfortable at home. There's as much distraction as there is at work, even more so now with Alice around not to mention when Sofia is with me she has the tendency to ask me to do errands around the house. It can feel frustrating to say the least.

So I don't know, It does help my wellbeing when I'm away from home, plus I'm sure if things get worse then we don't have a choice in the matter anyway. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you dont.

This whole Covid-19 Coronavirus thing

I wouldn't normally post topical things on here as they've never deemed relevant for me but for once in the news the Covid-19 epidemic has geniunely got me interested in seeing about it on the news.

I'm not sure what it is but I remember when September 11th happened it was so constant on TV that I became sick of it after a few days. I think it's because this is a much different situation and it's changing so often. This is so much more ingrained with our lives to the extent that it's changing the way of living somewhat and the cost of living sooner or later.

I'm currently still at work amidst all of the news stories about self isolation and working from home. It's frustrating because we're NHS employees yet they seem to blank the idea that since we're admin style staff there's no relevance yet we've all got the resources to work from home with our laptops and everything else.

I think it will eventually change within the next few days but it seems so illogical, it's bad enough when you have your own loved ones and neighbours asking whether you're being prepared to self isolate when you're in the middle of going to work explaining to them that your own workplace haven't told you to do so.

As I'm typing this sentence I was originally going to add as to how this will effect the house selling. But no sooner had I came back to finish this post it turns out that we already have a viewing booked for Friday! Our viewing officially appeared online as of this morning after confirming the details. But apparently at the same time there was a couple interested in looking for something that the estate agents suggested to them.

We'll see how it goes but for a first viewing I'm not expecting anyone to make an offer anytime soon.

Bluetooth controller woes

I thought this would be deemed worthy of a separate thread rather than piggybacking off one in another post. I find I tend to add additional subjects in partigular posts just to extend the subject but then I realise if I ever want to look through my archives it may not be as easy to find on the subject matter. So note to self - keep subjects separate!

Anyway, I've had a spot of bother recently with my PS4 controller. I noticed that most of the causes of the interference might be with my Bluetooth earphones. The way I have things connected is that I have a Bluetooth USB dongle connected to my PC for the controller. I then have next to it a Bluetooth audio receiver that plugs into the headphone jack port on the TV which the earphones receive the connection to.

So this means there's 2 sets of Bluetooth streams happening at the same time but separately from one another. I decided to go for 8BitDo's N30 Pro 2 which came yesterday hoping this would fix things. I also thought it would be nice to finally have a decent controller I can natively connect to the Switch also without the need of some sort of adapter. I would had done this with the PS4 controller to the Switch but after thinking it through I wanted to see what 8BitDo's one was capable of.

Unfortunately as it stands there doesn't seem to be any change so I put it down to being the earphones which does seem to be the case once I disconnect them. I could return the new controller but I didn't realise just how nice and compact it is. Plus I love the stuff they do, I never had much incentive for this controller for a while but I want to make use of it with the Switch as well so I'll give it a bit of a test run for a while but I think I just see myself keeping it anyway.

Now for sale!

I find it's only once in a year where I can have a good proper time off for annual leave and it's only because of the accumulative leave I've had outstanding. Even then I'm lucky if I can relax for a full week. Oddly enough this past week I have been able to even though all of us within the family were coughing all over each other. Luckily we haven't been victims of this crazy Coronavirus just yet!

We made the final step last week and signed the papers with an estate agent to sell our house. All that's left now is for someone to come over on Thursday of this week to take pictures of the house. Once that's done it should be available for viewing - we can only hope it garners interest. I can't help but feel with this epidemic doing the rounds that it will tarnish people being interested in moving. They keep saying now is the perfect time for putting a house for sale, but at what cost to us?

I currently don't feel the mood to be "excited" over moving as I know we can't do that yet. All my mind is transfixed to at present is:
a) How much of a good price we can sell the place to someone
and
b) How long it can take and whether their offer doesn't fall through.

We also have to consider how many viewings the house is going to have, which means constantly keeping the house in a certain way. I feel bad for Alice as she's a bit more limited for her toys at the moment. Her lovely Ikea play kitchen is upstairs in our spare room which she always plays with. I know she can go upstairs for it but it's not the same having it in the living room.

I'm hoping as the weather picks up we have some potential people wanting our place, I do feel it will sell but it's just knowing what the sold price will end up being. I really hope we don't get less than what we originally want! Time will only tell as the weeks go by.