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Date: 5/20/2020
Two weeks ago, I experienced something that I hadn’t since Reminder Publishing began our new normal of working from home: time off.
While not scheduled or by choice, a week of no work provided some insight into social distancing life that was maybe not evident to me before. After all, this was the first time in a couple of months that I felt like I wasn’t running around a kitchen where everything was on fire much like a certain beloved cartoon sponge does in an internet meme I’ve seen so often on social media.
In the work from home world, I attempted to maintain a routine that generally, with some variations from day to day, involved getting up with my two-year-old daughter and letting her watch some “Sesame Street” or “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” while I checked my email, make coffee for me and tea for my wife, make and eat breakfast as a family, help the two-year-old wash up and brush teeth and get her and myself dressed for the day, then send a friendly text to my suddenly best friend Curtis, our company computer wiz/Renaissance man who helps me connect remotely to the office every day. He loves getting texts from me and my colleagues, whether he admits it or not. And starting the day without his special brand of humor just wouldn’t feel right at this point.
From there, the day is primarily devoted to the pursuit of journalistic excellence.
The routine helps me keep focused and maintain a healthy mindset. But breaking away from it and having some time to shift my focus elsewhere was refreshing. But it also revealed an inconvenient truth: The “I would do it if I had more time” line is a lie.
And my wife knows it.
Having been in what we plan to be our “forever home” for about a year and a half now, the list of home improvement or repair projects has become long enough that writing it down in its entirety would become a daunting task in and of itself. I had high hopes for plowing through a decent part of that list, including expanding the garden, sanding the walls in my daughter’s room so we could finally paint it, installing a new shelf that I bought ages ago but is still sitting in the closet and installing a new (to us) garbage disposal.
The garbage disposal is in.
And it leaks.
Only a little bit, but one project has led to another.
The rest? Well, my daughter’s walls still have wallpaper glue on them from when I stripped them what seems like ages ago. That wall in the office is still shelfless. The garden is still the size of a postage stamp. And I still have to pick up some epoxy to fix that leak.
There always seems to be something else more important: like the two-year-old asking me to pick flowers with her, going on that third walk with the dog, watching that really cringe-worthy episode of “The Office” for the 100th time because it’s just that brilliant (you know the one I’m talking about) or, well, just sitting in the backyard because darn it, I deserve to relax from time to time.
My wife, bless her heart, really hasn’t brought up how little of my master plan was actually accomplished.
Maybe I’ll put the shelf up this weekend. Maybe.