cat named pig

“How’s working from home going?” you ask (well, maybe not you, reading this, but a lot of people have been asking me that question lately, and the answer varies wildly depending on the day).

Today’s answer to that question would be the following story about how I spent my morning:

I got up, got dressed in workout clothes, and threw my laptop in my bag before heading to the gym. (This was after dropping Siena off at school, because we missed the bus when she announced upon arriving at the bus stop corner that she absolutely HAD to go potty, right that minute, couldn’t wait till she got to school, etc., PANIC, etc., etc.)

So we got to the gym, I signed Elliot in to the kids’ gym, and grabbed a table to do some quick work before going upstairs to exercise. . . aaaaaand proceeded to sit there, working, for two hours. At which time I had to go get Elliot and take him home for lunch. The only muscles exercised were my fingers from typing (and from dialing the number of the Montessori program where Elliot goes one morning a week, to ask if we could add a morning because clearly this is not enough work time).

So that’s how working from home the gym is going.

I love how I wrote that last post about working from home and how I more or less have it all figured out and it’s going just fine, and then today Siena is home sick and I am just now sitting down to work for the first time at 2:46 p.m., which probably means I will be up until 2:46 a.m. finishing the work that hasn’t gotten done all day. (Yeah, you’re right — technically I still have not yet sat down to work, since I felt the need to blog about it before actually doing it. I always do this — deliberately waste time on trivial stuff when I’m really busy — and knowing I’m doing it does nothing to stop me from doing it. Apparently there is some masochistic part of me that goes “Yeah, this is bad, but let’s make it a little worse and see what that’s like.” Dear Self: It is NOT exciting! It will never be exciting to be up late trying to meet a deadline! It will only ever be stressful and crappy and you will be tired and hate yourself for doing this to yourself. Just do the damn work already!)

So I guess I’ll go do some work now. And in lieu of a decent blog post, I will leave you the promise of a longer post coming soon — a story about Elliot and a medical appointment and a temper tantrum heard on Jupiter. I’ll do my best to make it entertaining, because some good, somehow, has to come out of those excruciatingly loud forty-five minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I’m all about the silver lining.

Oh, and one more thing before I really get to work: did I mention that a mere two months into the whole working from home thing, Elliot has decided to give up napping? So I have a grumpy, tired, yet decidedly not sleeping little shadow who follows me from room to room messing up my stacks of paper and kvetching about not being tired even though GAHRR YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TIRED OR YOU WOULDN’T BE ACTING LIKE THIS JUST GO TAKE A DAMN NAP ALREADY!

I guess we all have our self-defeating behavior patterns.