This weekend was a scorcher here in New England. Our little backyard thermometer hit 114 degrees in the sun on Saturday, and only backed down to 96 when I moved it to a shadier part of the deck. Sunday was about the same. Today is supposed to be even hotter.

Did I mention that we don’t have air conditioning? We don’t.

But my office does. So while my youngest kids were splashing in the kiddie pool and my dear husband was sweating over yard work, I daydreamed about going to the office to beat the heat. Read the rest of this entry »

I was re-doing our budget for the umpteenth time the other night when I noticed that we spend more on gas right now than we do on food.

Once I stopped hyperventilating, I did the math again. And again. With gas hovering around $4 a gallon, my 80-mile round-trip commute costs me about $15 a day. My husband makes the same trip (at different times), which means that we pay about $150 a week just for gas for both of us to get to work. Our food budget, for our family of seven, is about $100 a week.

Insert expletive here.

I clip coupons, I buy in bulk, I cook from scratch, I only grocery shop for perishables and to replenish the pantry, I combine errands to save on gas. There has got to be another way to save gas and/or money (and/or my sanity).

Flextime. Telecommuting. Teleworking. The holy grails of the working mom, the mighty tools of work-life balance — now they’re fiscally and environmentally responsible, too! Read the rest of this entry »

My home office is tucked into a little alcove near our master bedroom, a gap between my closet and my husband’s, just wide enough for a small desk pushed up against the window. My dinosaur of a computer takes up most of the space under the desk (seriously, the computer is older than three out of our five children — my Palm Pilot has more memory), and my behemoth of a monitor eats up most of the desk top. When I need to scan or print something, I have to rearrange components and put the printer on the floor.

I used to have a proper home office, back when we first bought the house, before our youngest two were born. That room became the nursery. I moved my large desk into a corner of the guest room and took over most of the closet with my file cabinets and, um, crap; then we turned the guest room into our oldest daughter’s bedroom, and I downsized my workspace in order to cram it into that alcove.

I spend a couple or four hours there every night after the little kids are in bed — which is usually about two hours after I get home from my regular full-time job. My at-home nook is quiet, and the window is nice (plenty of natural, um, moonlight, I guess). I was pleased with it for a while — and then our big kids came up for an extended visit and there I was, upstairs, in solitary, shackled to my clunky desktop and my workload when I desperately wanted to be downstairs with them. Read the rest of this entry »