Category: Life in the cube

Working from home, week one

by Karen, posted in family, friends, Life in the cube, Work from Home, writing

At the end of my first week working from home, I thought I’d reflect a little on how it’s all going. There were several things that I knew would be different, but my days are shaping up to be much different from how I envisioned them. One of my friends said that she was worried that she’d be too isolated if she worked from home, since she lived alone. I never thought for a minute that I would feel that way, but it is sort of an isolated feeling to be sitting in your office alone all day, interacting with no one face to face. I mean. there are certainly people in the house sometimes while I’m “at work”, but I’m not a part of their activity, their day. I am APART.

What I thought I’d be doing once I started working from home:

  1. Exercising more, since I would have more time in the morning (you know, that part of the day before you talk yourself out of exercising?).
  2. Writing more. After all, I would be gaining more than 2 hours a day of not commuting and not getting meals packed and unpacked.
  3. Gaining weight. There is actually some walking involved in getting to and from Portland every day, parking the car, walking from the parking garage, taking a few sets of stairs…that would not be part of working from home.
  4. Seeing my husband and kids more.

What I actually am doing now that I am working from home:

  1. Turns out, I actually am exercising more. It will be 4 (maybe even 5!) days that I’ve done some form of excercise (yoga, beach walk, gym) by Saturday, versus the 1 or 2 days in a commuting week.
  2. Turns out, I’ve actually lost 2 lbs. Go figure.
  3. Turns out, I’m actually writing less. I really don’t have much downtime. I’m getting up later in the morning (which will end of course, when my daughter goes back to school in September) and pretty much going to bed shortly after I finish working at 9PM.
  4. I am seeing my family more, which is good. If I could only be right about one thing, I’m glad it was this one. 🙂

I’m missing a few things: seeing my friends at work,  the Wednesday Farmers Market in Monument Square, my audio books, the cupcake stores, Micucci’s pizza…

Pretty much, I’m still working on getting it together here, finding a new rhythm to my days.

Working from home, day one

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, Life in the cube, Work from Home
Almost there.

It’s coming together; my office is just about set.  All of the equipment has been hauled home and (with the help of the teenager) connected to the modem and everything actually works. What’s left to do is figure out what just does not fit and let it go (read: haul it back out of the house).

Here are some of the good things about working from home so far.

  1. I got more sleep! I was able to get up an hour and fifteen minutes later than I usually do. Yay! Of course, I still woke up at the same time but I rolled over and went back to sleep.
  2. I can wear whatever I want! My daughter said, “Can you wear pajamas to work now if you want to??” and I realized, “Yes! I can! I can wear pajamas now if I want to!”
  3. Things were so much less rushed. My daughter and I actually ate breakfast together this morning, which we usually can’t do because I leave (used to leave!) so early.
  4. I got to eat lunch with my entire family! My son was working the evening shift and my husband and daughter both happened to be home as well. They even cooked for me! (Okay, so I cleaned up; it was so worth it!).
  5. I got to eat dinner with 2 out of 3 of the family members! Okay, so son was at work, but I always got home too late to have supper with them this evening they waited for me and we ate together.
  6. When my shift ended, I was all through for the day! No hour commute to get home (of course, that means I missed an hour with my audio book, but I digress…as my husband pointed out, I can certainly pop it into the CD player in the house and listen to it!).

It was the best (work) day ever!

Setting up my home office, Part Three: Paint

by Karen, posted in Life in the cube, no fear, Work from Home

The walls and ceiling of the office-to-be are white, so at least it will be easy to cover. Earlier this month I went paint color shopping with my husband at Lowe’s. I spent an hour browsing through all of the paint samples. My favorite color is yellow so that’s where I started out, but then gravitated toward the lilacs (my favorite flower), the blues (my second favorite color)…I could have made a day of it. My husband (wisely) left me to go look at some tools or something while I basked in paint heaven.

When he came back, I roused myself from my stupor as he said, “Have any luck?” I proudly displayed the dozen or so paint chips that I had chosen, fanned out like a hand of cards. He looked at them briefly then pulled one lonely paint sample from his back pocket.

“How about this?” he said, and showed me a foresty green color. “Oh. That’s nice too,” I offered. “Well, you don’t have to decide today,” he said, so I put my paint samples into my bag to be revisited at a later date.

So I never did revisit the paint samples because day to day life got in the way. Then I talked to my husband on the phone from work one morning and innocently asked “Whatcha doin’?” and he said, “Painting”.

Whaaaaaa…? I thought, but did not say. “Oh,” I said. “What color?” I asked, feigning nonchalance. “Eggshell,” he said.

Whaaaaaa…? “What happened to the foresty green?” I managed. “I saw this and liked it better,” he said.  It really is just that easy for him.  My husband is spatially talented; he can look at a stick, plant it in the ground, and know what it will look like in five years; he can literally see the tree it will be. 🙂 I, on the other hand, look at the stick and see only the stick, in all it’s “Charlie Brown Christmas Tree” glory. Bill’s talent that translates well to interior design. He can sort through those millions of little paint chips and find THE  little paint chip of my dreams. More importantly, he can know what the entire room will look like when the painting is done.

It looks amazing. I totally love it. “Eggshell” turned out to be a pale yellow color, the pale yellow color that I was hoping for but unable to locate on my own.

🙂

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Next up: the flooring. To be continued…

A (working) room of one’s own

by Karen, posted in family, good grief, Life in the cube, writing
The empty room

As part of some, um, reorganization of staff at my place of employment, I have been given the opportunity to work from home. This will start on or before August 5, at which time Life in the Cube (as I’ve known it) will basically be coming to an end.  As exciting as this prospect sounds to a girl who is a card-carrying, white-knuckled driver when it’s snowing, it necessitates (shudder!) setting up an office at home.

My current “home office” is actually decentralized: my computer for bill paying and writing and such is in the kitchen. I’m set up at the end of the table which is situated in the corner of the room between two windows (and is sunny all day long, which is why I chose this spot). The filing starts out in a basket on a shelf of the kitchen island, then gets permanently filed in the cabinet in the upstairs spare room, or in binders to the left of the built-in desk in my bedroom. Stamps, stapler, envelopes, pens are kept in a kitchen cabinet.

The built-in desk is a good idea in theory, but in practice? Not so much. It faces a wall (I want a sunny window) and has a flourescent light (I want incandescent), both of which I hate, and therefore is not conducive to any actual work getting done. If I would be working 10.5 hour shifts from home, something (preferably almost everything) had to change.

Our mission (since we choose to accept it) is this: make the spare room into my office.

This might not be as easy as it sounds.

Step one was to check my internet speed to see if it was up to speed.

It was not.

Hello, incompetent technicians from my cable company. It took them 3 tries to get this working correctly and to repair what they damaged while installing the new cable modem. The third time was the charm.

Knock on wood.

Then we emptied out the room. “We” consists of me and my husband, with the emphasis on husband. He did most of the work: taking out the book case, the cd tower, the filing cabinet, the end tables, the love seat.

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All of this had to be put somewhere for the interim. That somewhere is our bedroom. It’s sort of overwhelming. The idea of “keeping your eye on the prize” now makes much more sense to me.

Now that the room is emptied, the next step is: Painting and flooring.

To be continued…

The day I ate whatever I wanted: Part 2 B (the day of)

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, fitness, Life in the cube, local fun, Midlife Crisis, restaurants, yoga
Chocolate Croissant from Standard Baking Co.

My friend Susan told me to have a: “Happy Birthday!!! Enjoy the whole day and do what YOU want!!”

My response: “Well, since I’m working it will be hard to DO whatever I want, but instead I’m going to EAT whatever I want!”

🙂

So here goes: Day 2B of “The day I ate whatever I wanted”…I’m starting to fear that this is a slippery slope…better reign it in after today. This is what I did on the actual day.

I decided not to go to the gym so that I could sleep an extra hour. Good decision. I decided not to do any laundry and not to stop to gas up the car. Those things could wait. My mantra for the day: “If it’s not ‘all about me’, I’m not doing it.”

Breakfast: Decided to wait until I got to Portland then sprinted over to the Standard Baking Company (no website, unbelievably) to get a chocolate croissant. Monument Square was packed with dressed up, suited up people at 8am; usually it’s a ghost town on the weekend at that hour. I heard there was some sort of a convention going on which almost made me late for work (reference: “sprinted” to the bakery!).

Note: Around noon I started rethinking the whole shorts thing;  may not have been the best idea…it barely made it out of the 50’s in Portland.

I continued to go where the whim took me. I didn’t follow any plan at all. I had two days to celebrate: the day before my birthday with my husband (which was awesome), and the birthday itself, which was kind of the icing on the (cup)cake after Friday.

For lunch, Micucci’s Pizza was a no-brainer. I was in luck too; they were just putting out the slabs of pizza when I ran up the stairs and grabbed one out from under the noses of the slower people assembling boxes to my right. When I ran down to pay I got to say “Hi” to the baker, Stephen Lanzalotta (author of  The Diet Code), who was just putting out the fresh cannoli…I resisted, since I had a piece of tiramisu from my son and a chocolate coconut cupcake from Two Fat Cats waiting for me for later on. A colleague at work, Laurie, handed me a chocolate shortbread cookie chaser after lunch, which enabled me to save the cupcake for later.

🙂

Had to miss my regular yoga class (with Kristen of Windsong Yoga)  in the morning so I was thrilled when a colleague Mary Ann said “Hey, want to do this yoga dvd with me at 2:00PM?”  I just happened to have my mat in the trunk, so that’s what we did.

To balance it all out, I ate half the Micucci’s slab for lunch then had the other half with a salad (with greens from the garden) for supper, followed by the cupcake and my favorite  (which is unfortunately seasonal) Keurig coffee that I saved from Christmas: Spicy Eggnog.

When I got home from work at 8:30PM I had a surprise waiting for me: gifts from the kids:

  1. An adapter that allows me to play my MP3 in the car from my son Anthony that I’ve been wanting forever and
  2. A handmade card with 3 dark chocolate covered cherries from my daughter Izzy.

What can I say? My kids know what I like. 🙂 My husband gave me my gift The Day Prior, but actually started it last fall. He got all of the raised beds ready for my fruit and vegetable gardens (not to mention most of the actual planting and watering thereof), and he bought many more lilac bushes for me (my favorite flower) and scattered them around the yard.  He knows what I like too. :D.

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This was the best birthday week ever.

The day I ate whatever I wanted: Part 2 A (the day prior)

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, friends, Life in the cube

Since my actual birthday fell on a day I had to work (and I had no way to get out of it!), my husband and I celebrated the day prior.  The weather forecast called for a bleak, cold, rainy day. Does the weather influence what you eat? It certainly does me, so I had made a pretty extensive list of ideas for meals  (as well as where to go for them!) and decided to see how the day actually turned out weather-wise before making any definite plans.

Well, the weather forecast was (as usual!) completely wrong. It was warm, sunny, beautiful. A day for eating outside, moving around, enjoying the sun. Based on that, here’s what we did.

First, split a bagel with peanut butter (him), almond butter (me), and honey. Went to gym. Ugh. Glad to get that out of the way. Similarly, got a few chores done (laundry, food shopping) so we had the rest of the day for ourselves.

For once, I had a coupon to use when I wanted to use it: we split a large coffee coolata with whipped cream from Dunkin Donuts. Next we went plant shopping for the vegetable garden.  We stopped at Riverside  in North Berwick and Gray’s in Wells. We bought some tomato plants, zucchini, summer squash, eggplant, watermelon, peppers.

With lunch in mind, we headed down Route One to Kittery. We decided to have a grazing day: stop at a bunch of places and eat a lot of food. First we went to Terra Cotta (no website) in Kittery. Everything there always looks so good that it’s hard to choose what to order…we settled on a Meatball and Ricotta Stromboli and a pasta salad, with one triple chocolate chunk cookie for dessert and ate it outside on their little patio.

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Next we looped back on Route One to Bob’s Clam Hut for fried clams. We briefly considered whether or not to order them crunchy or Bob’s way with a softer batter. We agreed on crunchy and it was a great decision.  Then we took the long way back along the coast to see the ocean (sigh; love the ocean).

Then we went to When Pigs Fly to buy a loaf of brown sugar cinnamon bread which we had a hunk of for an afternoon snack with some coffee.  Almost as good as my own bread. 🙂

Then home to get the seedlings in the ground. For supper, we decided to go to Big Daddy’s (no website) in Wells and have ice cream cones. I got what I always get, Kahlua Fudge Brownie, and it was as good as it always is. Bill got Coconut and Izzy got Maine Blueberry (in a wafer cone) and we switched cones periodically so we all got to try all 3 flavors.

Ice cream cones: they’re not just for breakfast anymore…

🙂

Cakewalk in the cube

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, friends, Life in the cube
Amazing cake baked by Kathy Cyr

The planets somehow aligned last week. That’s the only explanation that I can come up with for this phenomenon that occurred at my place of employment. Are we a restaurant? A cafe? A bakery? No. We are an office full of nurses.

Yet we  had 4 (count ’em) cakes to share during the work week. Birthdays, comings and goings, TGIF days…any of these are good enough reasons to let ’em eat cake. Some are store-bought, some are baked by colleagues…and we have some amazing bakers where I work.

The one in this picture was baked by Kathy (a fellow nurse) and this is just a small sample of the wonderful treats she bakes for us (which include breads, cookies, and whoopie pies, to name just a few things in addition to the cakes!). One bite of this cake and you completely forget that you are eight hours into your ten hour shift, your fourth one that week.  Yep; those are raspberries in the midst of all that chocolate.

The next cake we had was this lovely chocolate cake with vanilla frosting from the Wild Oates Bakery in Brunswick.  Shirley bought this cake for Pauline to celebrate her birthday this week.  It was the best birthday at work ever!

We also had two other supermarket variety purchased cakes, one (you guessed it) chocolate with vanilla frosting and the other (sorry, didn’t get a picture of this one) was marble with vanilla frosting. We were inundated with cakes! Both of these were very good, but were eclipsed by Kathy’s homemade one and the Wild Oates bakery cake.  Really though, it was a win-win situation for us all. Well, except for the people who avoid gluten. Sorry guys.

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Write it down, make it happen

by Karen, posted in books, Date night, family, fitness, health, Life in the cube, Midlife Crisis, no fear, Someone's gotta say it, tweens, writing, yoga

Okay, it’s a book (not mine!) title. It occurred to me to apply the philosophy of: “If you build it, they will come” espoused by James Earl Jones and put into force by Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams movie which coincidently (?!) contained a female lead character named “Karen” (not sure how she spelled it!) played by Amy Madigan.

I decided to build my perfect work day.

  1. Get up–not too early.
  2. Get some exercise. I like Stephen King’s idea from his book On Writing where he would take writing breaks and jump on the treadmill that was next to his writing desk (if memory serves). A little bit of yoga couldn’t hurt…
  3. Get some coffee–oh wait! That should be first!
  4. Get some breakfast (ABO…or “Anything But Oatmeal” :)).
  5. Write until noonish.
  6. Get some lunch.
  7. Check email, blogs, FB (you know, all the usual time-sucking suspects) etc.
  8. Read until 4pm. This is when I get to make a small dent in my pile of books, magazines that I am dying to read but have no time to.
  9. Get some more exercise…go for a walk? At the beach! Look for sea glass, sand dollars, unusual rocks and shells. Sigh. Life is Good.
  10. Watch DVD’s or preferred TV series of the moment (The Good Wife, Survivor, Breaking Bad) with my husband.

What does a perfect day for you look like? Quick! Go right it down; then maybe you can figure out a way to make it happen! 🙂

My one word: March update

by Karen, posted in family, Life in the cube, my one word, Pantry Project, tweens, writing

This is how March went:

  1. Changed sheets on bed: threw out excess of two sets (one set for the wash, one set for the bed is really all I need).
  2. Brought one book or magazine a day (well, most days) out of the house and gave away.
  3. Brought clothing that my daughter has outgrown to give to others who have daughters that are wearing that size now.
  4. Pared down what is in my work space in the cube to less than half of what had been there prior. If only I could lose as many pounds as my cube did this month!
  5. Unsubscribed from many of the automatic emails I was getting. Tedious, time-consuming clutter eliminated from my inbox!
  6. Working my way through  editing my manuscript… almost half finished!!!!

I am also wondering if my one word should change, or better yet, maybe I could keep the word “EDIT” since it seems to be working beautifully but consider it my major, like in college. Then I can add a minor (word), which is “FOCUS” (actually, this word was suggested by my husband; ‘nuf said).

I actually have been trying out my minor (word) this month and am finding it also to be a very effective tool.

Does having two “one words” mean I’m cluttering up my New Year’s Resolution? Will have to consider this. I guess I’ll see how it goes in April.

Change. Is. Good.

by Karen, posted in education, Life in the cube, Midlife Crisis

Repeat after me…change is good. Change is also hard. For every good reason you can think of to make a change, you will probably think of  almost as many reasons not to.

Here’s where a pros and cons list can come to the rescue. You can certainly do it the good old-fashioned way: take a piece of paper and pen to make your list: draw a line down the center, write “pros” on the left and “cons” on the right and have at it.

If you want to kick things up a notch, however, you can use this pros and cons list tool online. Enter your data on each side of your argument, then assign a numerical value to it using the tool as your guide. What’s great about this calculator is that you may think that think you are leaning in one direction, but after you complete the exercise with the calculator, you discover that you actually are leaning in the other direction! Hey, it could help!

Another cool thing about this is that you can print out your results when you’ve finished. I actually used this to make a decision that I though I had already made, but after I completed the pros and cons list tool I was surprised by the outcome. It compelled me to revisit (and ultimately, change) my decision.

See? It’s just like they always say: “You never know”; also, “It ain’t over till it’s over”.