Life Lately: Fully Back in the Office

Enjoying a meal at Hometown Hotpot & BBQ in Chinatown. It's K and I's favorite hotpot place.

My workplace finally announced a formal office return date, so I'm officially back in the office full-time now. It would have been lovely if the powers that be had decided we could keep some limited amount of work from home flexibility, but alas, that was not in the cards. 

While I'm a tiny bit disappointed, I'm not too surprised by this development because our workplace culture had always been really old-fashioned about strongly disfavoring remote work. So I didn't really expect to be able to keep any discretion to continue working from home sometimes. Oh well, it was good while it lasted! At least we're still allowed to dress casually at the office until further notice, our typical business casual office dress code has yet to be reinstated...

I've now had the opportunity to have at least one in-person hangout with each of my close friends living in NYC, and that's been wonderful. We've all been fully vaccinated for quite some time - and none of us have very young children or other household members who cannot receive the COVID vaccine - so we're all fairly comfortable now with going to restaurants, shopping in stores, and the like. 

K and I continue to make the personal choice to wear masks indoors while out in public, except when seated at restaurants or bars, or while actively eating and drinking in other settings. By now, most public settings in NYC don't really require masks for vaccinated people anymore. Though, in my experience, a good 30-40% or more of people in stores and other non-restaurant settings mostly still wear masks inside. (I admittedly don't go out to that many places. I still don't have all my pre-pandemic energy back for running errands all over the city!) 

Now that I'm feeling more comfortable with going out into the world, I'm starting to make all my long-overdue appointments for routine checkups and the like. For the most part, I was already overdue for these appointments long before March 2020, which was a little irresponsible of me... Hopefully my dentist and general practitioner will find that everything is in order! Once I drop by the optometrist, I'm already pretty sure they'll tell me I need a stronger prescription now, unfortunately. 

One thing that happened during the pandemic was that I started watching a lot more YouTube. Very recently, I've gotten into Eileen at Colourful Noir's channel, I think she has a really soothing voice and a lovely accent (I think she lives in the UK). She mostly talks about certain ultra high-end designer items, which are obviously not something I'm personally in the market for. But she approaches it from a refreshing angle focused on prioritizing responsible personal finance management first and foremost. Only after that's taken care of would she advocate shopping for a limited number of designer items that will get a lot of use in one's wardrobe. 

How are things going on the COVID-management front where you are? Are people mostly back in the office or the classroom in your part of the world? Do you have any favorite YouTube channels to recommend? I hope that everything is well for you and your friends and family.