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I woke up to unhappy train fairies. There were still narked at what the weather had done to their tracks and overhead cables and were holding up the commuters. Chelmsford station was closed for a while, and sporadic buses were ferrying miserable commuters from one end of each blockage to the other. It was being well documented on the radio and was enough to make me decide this would be a good day to work from home.

It’s months since I’ve spent a day working from home. I wish I could do it more often and skip the commute. Less stress, less cost, less hassle, less time. I spent the hour I’d normally be sitting on cramped and (standing on) crowded tubes our by the canal, walking its banks with my camera and looking at the storm damage. Things were not as bad as I had expected, and although I saw one large tree snapped and drooping down into the water most of the debris scattered across the fields and lanes was just leaves and small branches.

It was so relaxing. The birds, glad to not be having their feathers blown the wrong way and their nests almost shaken from the trees, were singing cheerfully to one another. I startled a pair of pheasants and as they flew up and off noisily they in turn startled me.

I had plenty to do, but took advantage of being out of London to work strict hours and knock off at six. I upgraded my Linux to Redhat 8, which looks and feels fantastic. It’s so much prettier than even Windows XP. I made endless cups of tea, glad to be away from the nasty machine we have in the office and only a few steps away from a kettle. I listened to the radio instead of MP3s so knew what was going on in the world without having to resort to a web browser, and I got far far more done that I might otherwise had the phone been chirping away as it usually does.

I ended the day feeling I had accomplished much, and not the least bit tired or worn down as perhaps I would. I headed for the gym and ran for half an hour to the tune of loud music then switched to the cross-trainers, now actually quite glad to be away from the naive drivetime presenter I’d been listening to who warned his listeners not to use the trains this evening. Surely he must guess that nobody actually uses this line for fun.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 28th, 2002 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.