Tag: work from home

Birthday club

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, friends, quest for the best, restaurants

Strawberry Nutella CrepeI am part of a great group of nurses who all work from home. Once a month we (mostly) all get together for breakfast and to celebrate a birthday, if there is one that month. This month we went to Two Hands Crepe and Juice Bar in Brunswick.

Okay, it’s a hike to Brunswick from Wells, but you can get thay-uh from he-uh, and it was totally worth the trip.

I ordered a sweet: the Strawberry and Nutella Crepe (pictured on the left) and it was EXCELLENT. The birthday girl, Annette, ordered a savory: the egg, ham, and cheese. Annette, who has spent time recently in France (I know, right??), said that her crepe compared favorably to ones she’d had there. So…Two Hands got a hit!

The space itself was sunny and bright. The staff was caring and conscientious. The artwork (paintings of animals) that adorned the walls was compelling. The giraffe Made. My. Day. 🙂

My only regret was that I didn’t have time to go visit the farmers market happening around the corner. It looked fabulous (note to self: plan extra time for the next Friday morning visit).

If you are in Brunswick for breakfast, go check them out.

(Hint: There is no parking lot. Find a space on the street out front.)

Bon appetit! 

(I know, predictable! But I couldn’t resist!!)

🙂

 

 

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 a home office, continued: the purge

by Karen, posted in books, my one word, Work from Home

I’ve been reading Mary Carlomango’s book Live More, Want Less slowly over a period of months. It’s organized into 52 chapters and my initial intent was to read a chapter a week (as the author suggested), then implement the “action items”  listed at the end of each chapter to help pare down my belongings, hopefully simplifying my life in the process. I started off okay, but then lost track of which week I was ‘supposed’ to be on, so now I’m picking it up occasionally and reading at random.

The chapter about books came at exactly the moment that I most needed it.  Currently I have books in many locations throughout the house. Now I am emptying out the room to use as an office that contained the bookcase and about half of our (okay, mostly my) books.  In our first home, we added on a room (not just for the books!)  and my husband had a bookcase built to fit on a wall that was very tall and very wide and accommodated all of my books: past, present, and future.  When we moved the big bookcase wouldn’t fit anywhere in the new house, so we found a smaller one at a yard sale which I am still using.

At first I thought I”d be able to reduce my collection and make it fit the space I had available,  and I did that. Unfortunately, over the years I have amassed books. I’ve been sort of stuck for the past few days as I tried to decide about what to do with not only the bookcase (where to put it in the now empty room) but also the books on it, on top of it, and in the basket along side it (full disclosure: there are more in my closet, under my bed, and in the built-in bookcase in the bedroom…oh, and in the kitchen!). When I posed this question to my husband, he said, “Maybe you don’t put the bookcase back in at all…”

That brought me up short.

Maybe I was asking the wrong question! What if I don’t put the bookcase back at all? In that case I would have (at least)one different question: What to do with the books?

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…