Home-but lost

Last year I was on the road (this defined as not sleeping in my own bed) for 176 nights. (This equates to 72% travel. The year before was 79% travel.)

So now I’m home for a few days. My wife Grace doesn’t shop for food too often, (she can eat rice and beans every day and be very happy.) so I usually find that there isn’t much food in the house when I get home. So as a result we tend to eat out a lot when I’m home. I eat out on the road, I eat out when I’m at home….it’s all the same, but the company is better at home. I’ve developed an allergy to food from Applebee’s and the like. It’s all pretty much the same at most places where the food is under $20 a plate.

So here I sit in my home office, with a medium size project sitting in front of me on one of my laptops. (Yes, that’s plural. I was concerned that my back didn’t bother me nearly enough so now I carry two laptops with high hopes landing myself with a severely twisted spine at some point in the not too distant future.) I need to finish this project by next Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I’ll present the report to a customer and ask them (in my most subservient tone) to please buy equipment from my company, for the measly sum of 1.6 million. So I have serious work to do…yet…I’m like a moth to the flame looking out my office window. The sun is shining, the weather is great, and I’d rather be doing anything except sitting here working on the report. I think this report will take me about twenty to twenty five hours to put together. Tick tock, tick tock…I don’t have time to waste unless I’m willing to swap time today for weekend time, which would make me very unpopular with Grace.

Being at home for the first few days during the work week is pretty weird. I have no routines at home for weekdays. I have a company official “office” about thirty miles from my house but I try not to go there. My productivity stinks when I go there. It’s rare for me to go there, so I end up socializing instead of working. I can be four or five times more productive at home, after acclimating for a few days. It’s these first few days that are hard. I usually end up cleaning up my desk and straightening up my home office for a day. (Mind you, it’s unusual for me to be home, so my desk gets kind of back logged with all the junk that I’ve brought home from all the trips between the last time I was “home” and “now”. Receipts that I need to file away, receipts I need to destroy, foreign currency, local currency. (I try to keep work money separate from home money.) Random reports, magazines, airline tickets….

I’m sitting here writing this blog instead of working on my report. I may as well just toss in the towel and go to the real office and flush the rest of my day and get it over with and hope that tomorrow is more productive.