I think the number one question I’m asked in connection with this space is how I make time for my husband and myself, in the midst of running my own business and taking care of two kids. And my usual answer is, “Who, now? What? Oh, you think my husband and I have quality time? Ahahahahahahaha!”

That’s a terrible answer, by the way. I don’t recommend it.

In the grand scheme of my various life responsibilities, I think I fall down on the job most often in my role as wife. And I don’t say that because I think I should be ironing my husband’s shirts, or anything like that, but because my husband is of the longsuffering sort. The kids need me. Clients need me. My husband is patient, and just about always willing to sit back while I tend to those who need me “more,” which is both awesome and sad. I love that his tolerance is so high, but I hate that it has to be. He deserves just as much (more?) of me as everything else.

Tonight we’re stepping out, and I couldn’t be happier.
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I’ll be the first to admit that even after years of freelancing, my desk is hardly the bastion of organization I’d like it to be. In fact, there are plenty of times when I’ve hidden from my desk rather than clean it up. But the fact remains that here in my office is where I run my business, and it’s been about a year since I wrote about office essentials, so I thought I’d revisit the topic.

Here we are, a year later. What’s makes my “wouldn’t work without it” roster for the past year? I’m so glad you asked, because I’m going to tell you. Quite possibly in excruciating detail, even.
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I get a lot of pitches via email, as a blogger. I get some pitches to me for my personal blog, some for this blog, some for my shopping blog, and even some for various other blogs for which I’m contracted to write. On very (un)lucky days I get the same pitch three or four times, to different emails, about different blogs. I’m inundated and I ignore most of it. It’s the working blogger’s equivalent of junk mail.

Lately I’ve started getting a lot of people magnanimously offering to allow me the honor of paying them to advertise my sites—either on their sites, in some magazine, etc. These I’m even more likely to turn down; why, exactly, would I pay to advertise writing that’s getting plenty of word-of-mouth coverage, already? I’m entirely too cheap for that.

But one day, circumstances converged and I decided to do a little experiment.
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My husband is bugging me for a vacation.

More specifically: He wants to take a couple of days to go away when the kids are off visiting their dad, and this is a perfectly reasonable request. Some might even say it sounds fun. (It does. Sound fun, I mean.)

But at the same time, I cannot get over feeling like I can’t possibly go away! There’s too much work to do! It costs too much! The sky is falling!

Okay, possibly that last one was a small exaggeration. I am just going to sit under this umbrella, to be sure, but still. (Do you feel sorry for my husband, yet?)
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Once upon a time there was a freelancer. She lived in New England, and it snowed all the time. Most of the time, even when it snowed, there was still school. Occasionally school was canceled for a day, and her children ran around like crazed monkeys for a while, and then they went back to school the next day.

Then that freelancer moved to Georgia, where it never snowed. Hooray! But then one day it did snow. It snowed a lot. It snowed so much that trees fell and cars crashed and power was lost and school was canceled for two days in a row and then the children required things like a warm place to hang out and food to eat—away from the house (and therefore, the freelancer’s home office)—and suddenly the deadlines were piling up and the freelancer’s blood pressure was getting a wee bit high.

Too bad this isn’t a work of fiction.
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