My secret life

I am blessed in a lot of ways.  Great friends, loving family, a good job, amazing children,  good health and a happy dose of luck and good fortune (although I tend to forget that sometimes).  I find it is easy to take the amazing, magical things in my life for granted, and it often takes a comment from someone else to remind me of how good I've got it. 

Yesterday, someone told me that they were jealous of my ability to work from home.  To my everlasting chagrin, I was surprised by that.  And then I remembered how much I wanted it, before I had it. And I know how much I don't look forward to disruptions in my ability to do that. 

But I do want to show the reality of what working from home is like.  It is constant disruptions (kind of like being in the office, but since I gave birth to these disruptions, they are harder to ignore) and a real and ever present danger of distraction.  I see the messy floor and I want to sweep it, vacuum it, mop it. I see the pile of clothes, I want to wash them, fold them, put them away.  I see the sun outside, I want to sit in it, garden, swim in the pool.  I see the bed, and I want to nap.  See what I mean?

When I work from home, I often don't get out of my pjs until the afternoon.  I wear a lot of hats and hairbands.  When there is nothing to drive you to be up and out of the house, there is no need to worry about early morning showers.  It gets easy to be a little antisocial, when your only communication with other people is via the computer.  After days of this, I sometimes don't want to be a real girl anymore, but am happy being the troll living under the bridge.

My good friend, and fellow work-from-homer, Lynn, had one of the best qualifiers.  If you have different levels of sweats, as in casual, stay at home sweats, and dressy sweats that are good enough to wear to Walmart (and they hopefully won't land you on the pages of "People of Walmart"), then you know you work from home too much. 

I admit, I do have dressy sweats.  :D

But it also means that I don't have to drive in the snow in the wintertime.  It means I don't have to do my make up, and if I am having an ugly or fat day, I don't have to shine it on for anyone.  It means that I can take my lunch hour and snuggle with my babies, throw the ball for the dog, or even take a walk around the block. 

So, because I am a glutton for punishment, here is what the reality of my working from home looks like.  Please, be kind.  :)



me, in my comfy clothes, and hat.  My bed isn't made, and the purses beside me have all my VPN tokens, cell phone, date book, and other planners.  The ever present can of almonds is almost buried underneath.

yep, that's the dog, sleeping at the end of the bed.  My stack of notebooks and the laptop is literally on my lap.

And here is the reason I am working on my bed and not at a desk or table.  Sawyer wants to watch My Little Pony.  The ensuing disastrous mess is what follows her basically everywhere that she goes.

  So, that's what I live, pretty much any day.  The mess, I know, will dissipate a bit when the kids return to school.  I shoo them outside in the afternoons, or in between the rain showers, so that I can sometimes shovel a path through it. 

I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.  I'm a lucky girl.

Rosie N. Grey
The N stands for "never leaving again".