Friday night. Ten full weeks since this adventure began. Hard to imagine that two days from now, I’ll be back in my giant rental room, back in the familiar surroundings but without the familiar presence near me…

Got an interesting proposition at work, but the timing was all wrong. My warehouse colleagues are wondering when I’ll return – the answer, of course, is when the official guidance calls for it. So far, the official line is that we can self-isolate through October. It’s been a bit of a reputation race between tech giants: Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been setting farther and farther dates for returning to work. (That process began in March.) Twitter threw down the gauntlet when they said their employees can work from home permanently if they’d like. Then Spotify followed the suit. A few days ago, Facebook said the same thing, but with an important caveat: the salary would be tied to the cost of living in the place where you’d actually reside. (Meaning their California employees wouldn’t keep their high salary if they worked remotely from rural Oregon.)

I’m curious to see what Amazon and Google will do. This whole mess is definitely affecting the way companies operate. My team has just onboarded five new hires, and they aren’t meeting any of us in person – it’s just a lot of remote training, making the process even tougher and stranger than it usually is.

…we spent our last Friday night together watching the sunset at a scenic overview, with the river fading into the darkness as we had yet another conversation about what would have been. Packed and strange day tomorrow as we’ll try to do a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing.

World news: Brazil’s official death toll has crossed 20,000. The actual death toll won’t be known until much later, I’m sure. More insanity with the US politics, but what else is new?