How to Work at Home

I have worked from home for ten years. People say, "Oh, real tough. Pajamas all day." Working from home has serious dangers: burnout, weight gain, backache, poor overall health, depression. I share here advice I learned the hard way:

• Allow yourself time off each day.
• Eat three good meals a day. Not all at once.
• Draw strict boundaries between work time and time off. Do not be always available.
• For best results, start the day with work. Also known as "start strong."
• Keep two-column to-do list with "must do today" on one side, and "universe, you take care of it" on the other.
• Don't keep sweets around, including dry cookie mix, because you will pick all the chocolate chips out of the dry cookie mix and then eat by the spoonful what's left.
• The only snacks in the house should be terribly fibrous items such as raw carrots or Triscuits. 
• Drink water.
• Social media and surfing will exhaust you via cumulative decision fatigue, and social media as a business strategy does not work.
• Exercise or do physical labor or your body will rapidly age and your mood deteriorate: no joke.
• Demons hate fresh air.
• Those working at computers need real office chairs that fit them and maintain good posture.
• That little skin tag is not cancer.
• Specs wearers, have an optometrist make you "computer glasses" with single-vision lenses that show clearly only that which is 18 to 23 inches from your face. "Computer glasses" reduce squinting and neck craning, and are cheap.
• Shower in full and dress in fresh clothing twice a week, such as on Wednesday and Sunday.
• Limit pasta to one day per week. Something to look forward to.
• Never try to trim your own hair.
• Doing the impossible trains your employer to expect you to do more impossible assignments.
• One day per week is laundry day. Do not do laundry on any other than the designated day, unless you have kids.
• Do have three working computers in the dwelling, especially if one of them has Windows 10.
• Back up your work, and your clients', into the cloud or onto a thumb drive.
• Pull the plug from the TV and do not use it except to play exercise DVDs.
• Sleeplessness, a very much changed appetite, or feeling sickened when you approach your work station, are signs of burnout. Stress is about to ruin your health. Recovery might take months. Reduce your efforts at once.
• When you find yourself reviewing the same thing over and over, or reading and not comprehending, quit for the day.
• If your ears are ringing, quit for the day and go to bed as soon as is feasible.
• Do what you promised your boss or client you would do, and offer no more than that unless you are offered more money.
• Withhold information about your personal life. Bosses, clients, and students are not co-workers or friends. Avoid volunteering unnecessary information, such as describing how hard you worked on a project or that your son is graduating next week.

Best of luck.

Use It Up, Wear It Out

The garage is a universe of ungodly junque including a clear plastic tri-fold egg carton I should have recycled months ago and also a big dirty bag half full of potting soil, and so today, as the world closed down, I spooned soil into the plastic dimples, soaked it and planted 12 collard seeds, showing them the seed packet to encourage them. Closing the carton created a terrarium. It's now in a dark warm place. Possibly the seeds will germinate in five to seven to ten days, maybe. I realized I have utterly forgot how to garden, remembering only that the largest part is faith.

Next I wanted, or rather, needed, for the very first time to put up a house number, but didn't want Mylar numerals stuck on the siding or the constant sight of numerals disrupting my contemplation of nature. Everyone until now has found this house, but one dark night someone had to drive seven miles from here to catch enough phone signal to call me and wail that there was no house number, and I had to go stand on the highway with a lantern to guide them.

What might the solution be? In the garage, behind trashbags of packing peanuts, was a two-foot metal planter so old I had grown up with it, heavy and too corroded inside to plant in. Inverting it over a rock and applying the numerals created a sturdy yet portable and removable house number, a courtesy for the Instakart drivers and first responders one might need in a pandemic.

These frugal up-cyclings enhanced the refreshing and sparkling spring day, ideal for scrubbing the bird feeder and refilling the outdoor mousetraps with poison, admiring the perennial crocuses down by the road; a hawk careering in an uncluttered sky and red cardinals calling to hardly anybody.

Long Lost

Our sign says "No Turnaround" but trucks can't read, and when backing up inch by inch to try to turn around, their tires fump down off the gravel and churn up a track of mud maybe three inches deep. In spring especially. Today while walking the trash can back up the incline I saw something odd in the latest tire track, stopped, recognized it.

I had splurged on a five-piece set of Henckels scissors around 2002, and by 2007 or 2009 had worn out its kitchen shears and flower shears and the other, and lost two including the pair I favored for harvesting herbs. Never again had a set that elegant. It's 10 years later and I notice handles?!?!? in the wave of mud.

Pull 'em out. The herb scissors. I'll be darned. The pivot is dark with rust and corroded, looks like a raisin, but the blades are still keen. Rinsed it, and scrubbed away some of the rust with baking soda. Gave it a little lubricant. Maybe I can replace the pivot.

I'm amazed. Just amazed. Durability.