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.

Look, I know that we’re relatively lucky, here; the power came back on last night, and even when we didn’t have power we had someplace to go that did. I took my computer with me and was able to do a little work here and there. It’s not a big deal, in the grand scheme of things.

On the other hand, having both children home for two days in a row (when no one has the decency to be sick, which would at least afford me some quiet time while they nap or lay on the couch) on days when I need to be working is a big schedule disruption for me. And by “schedule disruption” I of course actually mean “giant pain in the ass.”

The kids are old enough now that I can send them off to amuse themselves, of course, and they do, for periods of time. Thank God for the Wii, for example, and for the overdue library books I forgot to bring back to the library before the Snowpocalypse started. But when you have more than one child, even the most harmonious of settings eventually disintegrates into “he’s touching me” or “she’s not letting me” or something else that makes me want to say, “Until I’m done with this project, everyone go to your rooms and stare at the ceiling.”

Oh, well. Sometimes I just have to do what I have to do. I got very little done during the day yesterday, so I did some work last night after the kids went to bed. I have to remind myself that that kind of flexibility is a lucky thing.

Especially when it means that a restoration of power in the house needs to be celebrated with a couple of games of Mario Kart.