Posted by Holly at July 31st, 2008

Where is the cleaning up the desk Genie? And the creating a perfect garden one; or, at least a perfectly beautiful garden even if it isn’t perfect. And where are the cleaning the house, doing the laundry – ooops, I’ll have to get up, now, and transfer the hours-in-waiting wet stuff to the dryer – and the dinner Genies? How is it that, with no daily, exterior job, I still never have time to get everything – sometimes, anything – done? Part of the answer is that my day, the part I devote to stuff I do and Jim doesn’t, ends when his day ends. When Jim comes in at the end of the day, it’s time to get food into him and we do like to cook together. It means, however, that at about 5 PM I’m pretty much done in the office, if I’ve even spent a good day here. Usually it’s like today: I spent the morning weeding before it got so blisteringly hot, sneaking in a few email conversations; phone conversations to make appointments or check on stuff we’ve ordered for the winery; paid a couple of bills; wrote some thank you notes; scooted around the web looking for various things like the best sites to sell antique books, new places to put this blog; sorted through the piles on the desk….

My revelation came a couple of days ago. In my previous life, the one in which I had an exterior office, I often didn’t settle in to the work at hand until 5 PM, after most people went home. That’s when the daytime flow stopped and there was concentrated time, at least a couple of hours. Not that my desk was much neater; it wasn’t, but my life certainly felt a lot more organized. I attempted to explain this to Jim the other day, when it hit me. He wasn’t especially keen to hear it, though; so, after repeating that I had this revelation three times and then asking if he had actually heard me, he grudgingly answered he had but it ended there. So he never heard my unspoken suggestion that I might be more productive if I sat here for a couple of hours in the evening.

I think I might have had a deeper insight into the women’s movement if I had led a life that kept me working in the home from the beginning. Oh, well, no more time to complain as our dinner will take a little forethought, four kitties are sitting here and looking pointedly at me and a dog is languishing near the kitchen door knowing his empty dinner bowl is on the other side….