Observations About Working from Home

I've been working (mostly) from home for the better part of four and a half years now.  I think I've been working from home so long that if I had to go to an office every day I'd experience some sort of weird freakout where I'd wear PJs and look for my dog.

A lot of people tell me that working from home must be amazing but honestly there are cons to it just like any other working situation. The lack of socialization can get to me sometimes, leading me to engage in long monologues with myself or directed at Cypress. Sometimes it's hard to focus and get shit done. It really isn't for everyone and I've known a lot of people who just can't deal with setting their own schedule and not having people to talk to all day.

Anyway I've been thinking about some little observations I have about working from home and how I organize my day, and congratulations, you get to read about them!

Lunch at the "office." Also, my deodorant. 

1. I've learned that the best time to go to the store to do grocery shopping (a daily activity because I suck at meal planning and Rob goes through milk, bread, and PB&J like you wouldn't believe) is 10:30am. It's late enough to avoid morning traffic but too early to hit lunch traffic (which on Fridays includes school traffic, as schools in New Mexico only have a 4 1/2 day week). Plus the parking lots and stores themselves are more or less empty. Also, work is quieter at that time since in the Eastern Time Zone it's lunch time.

2. Working out is one of those things that everyone thinks they'd have time for if they just worked from home. Guess what? If you're like me, you just find new ways to procrastinate.

3. Speaking of procrastination, Facebook, Twitter and Bloglovin' are huge time-wasters. I work relatively quickly so it's rare for me to run tightly up against deadlines, but regardless, I spend far too much time reading statuses about other people's workdays.

4. For some reason it is way easier to forget to eat when I work from home. On a project (when I'm actually onsite teaching or whatevs) I require a relatively hearty breakfast and am incredibly hungry by lunchtime, but there have been days at home where I literally eat nothing until dinner time.

5. I like being able to set my own schedule, i.e. working more in the evenings to compensate for getting personal things done in the mid-afternoon. It's also nice that I can help out friends when they need it, like when my friend Mari's car broke down this week and I needed to take her to Rob's crew base to pick up her boyfriend's truck.

6. So much pajama-wearing and TV-watching, seriously.

So there it is, random shit I think about while sitting around in my jim-jams staring at the computer screen as though it'll do my work for me. Any other observations from those of you in the working-from-home army?

Kick Links

Classic paintings recreated with modern celebrities. (via my friend Molly on Facebook)

George Takei Responds to "Traditional" Marriage Fans. I find it appropriate that apparently none of the "traditional" marriage fans can spell or write for shit.

Cosmarxpolitan.

19 Cats Who Need to Check Their Privilege.

Shit my students write.

Mormonism's most dangerous morality lesson.

Minimalist posters sum up each art movement.

How men grieve. I find the differences between how men and women grieve following death of a spouse or family member to be fascinating.

Torture techniques of the Spanish Inquisitions. (via Nova)

Read about the real-life never-nudes.

Shocking and Unexpected Google Street View Photos.

Women and young girls in Mauritania are force-fed to make sure they achieve the country's "ideal weight."

Try the Beyonce Baby Name Generator. (via Megan) Mine was Cobalt Aloe.

The problem with #FitchtheHomeless. I'm glad someone wrote this, the whole concept struck me as kind of iffy and I couldn't really articulate why.

What if people told European history like they told Native American history?

The most incongruous book covers of all time. Oh, sexualization. Author Maureen Johnson implored readers on her blog to flip their own covers for a similar effect and these are the results.

Yet another reason why Dr. Seuss is awesome. Also, I was in my school library when my mom told me that Dr. Seuss had died in 1991 (no idea if she remembers that or if I'm remembering it right), appropriate eh?

Are we laughing with Charles Ramsay [the man who helped Amanda Berry escape from the hellhole in Cleveland]?

Magic Eye Girlfriend. Sweetest and saddest comic I've ever seen. (via STFU, Conservatives)

I love "Top Photos of the Year" compilations.

I also love neat, crafty life hacks.

Still Not Sure if They Have MORE Fun...

So if you follow me on any social media outlet (Facebooks, Tweeter, Instagraph) you know that this happened on Sunday:

Yep, I'm blonde now. Blonde for the first time since I was a wee babe.

I don't know if you guys can tell but aside from chopping all my hair into a pixie cut in 2003 on a whim at summer camp, I never had a "go crazy with hair" period. To tell you the truth, how one styles one's hair, that's just something that I've never understood. I don't understand blow-drying, I don't understand straightening, and I don't have patience for either.  I am extremely low-maintenance when it comes to my hair. And honestly I kind of like it that way.

Rob told me he thought maybe I should grow my hair out, and I told him I'd be happy to if he was willing to condition, blow-dry and straighten my hair every morning to keep my head looking like a mushroom.

You guys know about my head-shaving experiment last year, which was awesome and which I'd do again in a heartbeat if the circumstances were right. Basically I got it in my head for about ten minutes and decided to do it.  Blonde was basically the same. Suz and I talked about it and the next day, my hair looks like this. Blammo!

So I have some questions now that I'm blonde.

1. Can I still wear yellow clothes? Are there any other colors I need to stay away from given my hair color?

2. Is there some special shampoo I should be using aside from normal color-treated-hair shampoo?

3. Should I keep dyeing my roots? Is that a thing? Are roots a thing?

4. Do I need to wear makeup every time I leave the house to avoid looking like Draco Malfoy?

Sometimes I think I am Lumpy Space Princess.

Happy weekend, friends! This is about to be the most random post you read all day.

I haven't sat down to write a post in awhile now, because every time I sit down to write I'm like whatever you know meh. Then some self-loathing, and insecurity that my life is too boring.

Buuut moving on.

We've had a pretty eventful week. I spent the first few days in Boston teaching a class and getting my flight canceled and staying in a shitty-ass hotel in Dallas, TX during all those crazy tornadoes.  I was initially upset--four years of work-travel and I still burst into tears when a flight gets canceled--but I was safe and met some cool ladies on my trip to the hotel and things. Rob laughs at me because I generally find some kind of friend even in shitty circumstances because I LOVE TO TALK.

Have you guys ever seen the show "Veep" on HBO? We started watching it after we got caught up with all the True Blood episodes.  We'd heard mixed things but it's actually pretty hilarious. So if you like Julia Louis-Dreyfuss go check that shit out.

Fire season is a bit more..relaxed than last year. This time last summer Robbie was already on a massive fire as of Mother's Day, so we're waiting for fires to start popping up.  In a weird way I've been hoping he leaves soon so I can start getting back into the routine of him being gone. Ignoring, of course, that when he's gone I spend an inordinate amount of time lying face down on the couch bored out of my skull (as does Cypress).

If you don't care about this post just feel free to die upon seeing this photo. 

So now it's the weekend, and we're doing a lot of dog park time,  frolicking about town, riding the Chang in the ABQ, and mayyyybeeee coloring my hair platinum blonde tomorrow, what?! I probably should've kept that secret and done some big reveal, but you know what? You only live once. (I refuse to use the acronym)

Oh hey, for Breaking Bad fans: did you know that there's a doughnut shop in Albuquerque that makes a doughnut with blue rock candy in homage to the blue meth in the show? I haven't gone there yet since, you know, I can't eat doughnuts, but I do know that they've gotten some flak from the community since meth is a real problem here and yadda yadda and so forth.  But I mean if you can't laugh at drug abuse, what can you laugh at? Or something. Anyway come visit me and I'll buy you a meth doughnut.

Links for Sale

How Historical Figures Would've Looked Today. (via Nova)

On African-American Vernacular English (colloquially known as "Ebonics") as a valid form of speech. Language really is amazing, isn't it? (via Nova)

Princess problems.

My favorite letter to the douchecanoe Abercrombie and Fitch CEO yet.

A Tumblr devoted to finding affordable housing in New York City.

My virginity mistake: I took an abstinence pledge hoping it would ensure a strong marriage. Instead it led to a quick divorce.

Did you hear about O'Hare's newest "green" initiative to control weeds? Warning: it's adorable.

Pro-choice: some reasons why a feminist/womanist would take her husband's name. I took Rob's last name for my own reasons, and it gets my hackles up when people pretend to understand those reasons somehow better than I do.

These both made me laugh (via Frodobooth):

In a parallel universe...

The Best Video You'll See Today is Only Six Seconds Long. 

Little Bits of Santa Fe

Suz and I had a pretty busy weekend. Since the boys' "weekend" falls on Wednesday and Thursday we're usually on our own (which I guess isn't all that strange during fire season).

Side note: I don't think I have introduced Suz at least beyond "my friend who has that dog that looks like Cypress" so let me do that now. Suz was on Rob's fire crew last year (and for several years before that) but decided to go back to school and check out some other options this year. She is dating Luke, one of the permanent employees on the fire crew, so she's getting to experience the other side of fire this summer. So far it's been really great having her perspective, i.e. why things happen as they do, what might happen given current circumstances, etc., and she's a pretty cool cat so I enjoy hanging out with her anyway.

Anyway on Saturday night we checked out a drag show in Santa Fe to benefit the Southwest Care Center, an organization that specializes in treating people who have been diagnosed with HIV. We spent the majority of the show laughing, drinking (yeah cash bar!) and bemoaning the fact that some of the men in drag had nicer legs than we did (short people problems).  It really was a blast, I'm hoping we'll get to experience more fun events like it in the coming months.

We spent Sunday walking around the Railyard and the Plaza here in Santa Fe, two places that usually have a lot going on at any given moment.  We ate Indian food on a sunny patio and had some drinks at a bar I'd never been to before, and for a Mainer being able to live in a city for over a year and finding a restaurant you haven't been to before is pretty damn exciting.

When I first found out that Rob wanted to be a wildland fire fighter, I assumed I'd be doing the whole thing more or less alone. Given my varied (and sadly, mostly negative) interactions with wives when Rob was in the Army I didn't hold a whole lot of optimism that I'd find people like me or that I really wanted to spend time with.  I can say now, over a year later, how happy and how grateful I am to have met so many awesome ladies through this experience.  I really do not know what I would've done last year, or what I would do this year, without the help and camaraderie of my fire lady friends.  Lately I've been hoping that when Rob and I move on from this experience, most likely in the fall but maybe later, we'll be able to maintain contact.

Anyway, enough of me yammering on about nothing, here are some photos of our walk around town:

...from what?

Oh, and ANGLER FISH CAR.

Things That Terrify Me

Like a lot of you my feed has been filled with these "May blog every day" posts. I don't plan on participating (but to avoid being a total knob will link to the original here), but some of the posts have provided good inspiration for blog topics every now and then.

Since I'm an anxious Larry, you probably could guess that I'm scared of a lot of random things and you'd be right. I've talked about my fears before but every now and then a few new ones pop up, so why not an update?

Things I'm Scared Of:

- Trains and train crossings
- Rob dying or leaving
- Losing my family 
- Spiders
- Ants
- Camel spiders
- Car Washes
- Machines underwater
- Anything underwater that shouldn't be there (like fish and rocks and shit)
- People breaking into the house
- Spiders crawling out of the jets in my jacuzzi tub legs-first
- Bones breaking or seeing bones break
- Being left out of things
- Social interactions with unpredictable people

What are you scared of?