The New Normal

I’m back in the U.S. after a year away on sabbatical. We found an apartment, moved our stuff from storage, and bought basic supplies and groceries to restart life here in the new normal. The global pandemic rages on. The U.S. isn’t doing anywhere as well as the country I came from, and I’m amazed at how many people are walking around not wearing masks here.

Since it hasn’t been fourteen days, I’m avoiding going into my office and lab. The good thing is that I’ve gotten over the hump of working from home the last several months. I haven’t set up a dedicated work space at home yet – we’re mostly unpacked, but haven’t finalized exactly where we’d like our furniture to reside for optimal functionality and some aesthetics. I might have to get a new chair and a better headset and headphones if I’ll be doing more remote meetings; I didn’t do many while on sabbatical so it wasn’t an issue.

The semester begins in two months. I don’t know yet if my classes will be fully in-person, or hybrid, or fully remote. A lot will depend on how the state and county are doing over the next two months. I hope to teach in-person, especially since I’ve missed that face-to-face interaction with my students for over a year now. This week I’ve started to set aside some time to learn more about best practices for remote teaching, going through resources that my university has put together. I’ve yet to host my first Zoom meeting, although I’ve been a participant in many. I haven’t used my university’s LMS as much, but I’m starting to browse the different features in case I have to do a lot remotely – my HTML-hacked course website will probably not suffice, even though it has worked well for in-person teaching thus far. And I’ll have to experiment with some lecture-capture technology.

In the meantime, I’m trying to make research progress and hope to finish writing up a manuscript before classes begin and I get very busy with other things. One nice thing about being back in the same city as my university is that VPN works much faster. Since I’m a computational chemist and much of my remote work involves logging on to the local computing cluster and moving files back and forth, I’m happy to have smoother connections and less latency. We also signed up for higher internet speed and bandwidth at home, so that helps.

I’m not completely over jet lag. At present, I’m falling asleep at 9pm and waking up at 5am. That’s not a bad schedule. Maybe I should make this the new normal in my new normal!