Back to Work!

Alright, I'm not gonna lie, the momentum from entries nearly daily over my sabbatical year doesn't die completely like that---I still feel a little... compulsion to write something.

So I started work at my new place---it's located on the NUS campus even though it isn't really NUS related. It's close to the old I²R place where I worked at waaaaaaaaay back in 2006. After nearly twenty years though, they finally built a covered walkway for that flight of stairs up to the old building, which is nice.

This time though, I didn't go for the boots option: the bus-only route in the morning seems to work well. The same irritations that I mentioned so many years ago still hold---the field still exists, it still gets muddy, and there are still tons of uphill stairs to walk on.

Some things change, some things just seem not to.

The good news though is that I don't take the train in the morning to commute to work---I only take the train back at the end of the day, after which I just take the lazy way and use the concrete path to cross the road via the traffic lights, as opposed to the distance-optimised path. No real reason why I tend to do that either... maybe it's just being older and less wanting to ``optimise the shit'' out of everything?

First impressions of my new work place and role? Well, it'll pay the bills for sure. Thanks to the control measures of COVID-19, I ended up being the sole soul in the entire room that houses my section of the organisation, which means that it is really friggin' cold most of the time. I finally found where the water dispensers are, which means I can substitute my canister of coffee and bottle of water with a bring-once cup, spork, and instant coffee set up.

Role's sorta grounded with ``payin' the bills'' type of work, but has quite a bit of flexibility to expand/extend into other areas that are more research-y. It's too early to tell much though, mostly because I haven't really interacted much with the rest of the team just yet.

The pace that I seem to be going right now feels a little too hurried as compared to the pace that I am sensing---not sure if it's because I cannot actually see the folks to have a proper gauge, or if I have been too traumatised from the on-site work that I was doing at my previous place that default to running at beyond full-tilt, even though I'm literally new. It's okay---the faster I do the ``payin' the bills'' type of work, the more time I will have left to work on the research-y things.

Who knows... maybe something wonderful can come out of that.

And that's about it. I'm beat---I reckoned I've walked more over the past couple of days than I had in a typical week while on sabbatical, and this time, with the additional heavy load of lugging my own work equipment around (just like the bad old days while working on-site). About 1.1 km of walking split between walking to my first bus stop (450 m) and walking from the last bus stop to the building (550 m) in the morning commute, followed by about 1.7 km total on the trip back (550 m from my office to the first bus stop, 1.1 km).

Shit. And here I was, thinking that I was doing sub-2 km walks while I was really walking some 2.8 km a day just for commute alone. No wonder my legs are feeling beat up.

Well... as long as I'm not blistering, I think I'm fine. It can be a good aid to me to accelerate that weight loss that I started on back in late 2019 that got horrifically side-tracked during the work from home and subsequent sabbatical year from COVID-19 control measures.

Here's to reaching my target goal of 65 kg then!