… stressing down the road!
Crankily, crankily, crankily, crankily,
Balance is a load [of crap]!

(To the tune of “Row, row, row your boat.” Obviously.)

I’m having One Of Those Days. And the thing is, I need to get over it. Yes, I lost the entire morning to sick kids and doctors’ appointments and the pharmacy and copays, but I need to remember what it was like when I worked at an office, and was a single mother, and a day like this meant missing work entirely and wondering if I was going to be fired. (I actually brought my sick kindergartener in to work with me one day; I set him up in the corner of my office on a sleeping bag, with a portable DVD player and headphones, thinking I couldn’t afford to miss another day and he’d be just as fine there as at home. My boss sent us home, anyway, and I ended up feeling even worse for trying to sort of split the difference between maintaining my responsibilities and taking care of my child.)
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I’m back from Mom 2.0 Summit and I had a fantastic time. I truly did. And I say that as an introvert, which is why I thought today I would spend a little time talking about how to handle conferences if you maybe think you can’t handle conferences.

“But you’re not shy!” People say to me. “You like people! You’ll talk with anyone!” And all of that is true; I do like people and I don’t consider myself shy. Nonetheless, an introvert is someone who is sapped of energy through interpersonal interaction rather than energized by it, and so I am categorically an introvert even though I enjoy this stuff because—by the time I get home afterward—all I really want to do is sleep for a week. It takes a lot out of me.

And I made a lot of mistakes when I first started going to conferences, mostly because I felt unsure of myself and didn’t want to “miss” anything, so I thought it was worth a discussion. The fact of the matter is that now, conferences still wear me out, but I come home feeling good about the experience. And that’s kind of the point, no? Consider this your Cliff Notes on attending a conference as an introvert.
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I’ve got about a week and a half to go until Christmas, and I think I’m going to make it. It’s all going to be fine. I’m sure it is. It has to be, right? It will. Obviously.

It is helpful, at this time of year, to remind myself that I feel this way at this time of year every single year without fail. Because the way I feel right now is sort of how I imagine the last mile of a marathon feels. I keep telling myself that I just have to keep going until Christmas, at which point I can pull back and relax a little bit. It’s just that right now I have to do all of my regular work as well as “prepare for the holidays.”

(I think maybe the holidays should learn to prepare for themselves. That would make things a lot easier….)
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Literally. Dammit.

Over a dozen years ago, I came down with an inner ear infection at work. At the time, I was working at a giant IBM site, and when I was struck with a sudden intense dizziness in the ladies’ bathroom, one of my colleagues called our on-site paramedics. I was terribly embarrassed by the whole thing; they started checking me for things like signs of a stroke, and I was in my early 20s. It turned out to be an inner ear thing, though, which pretty much just disturbs equilibrium and is annoying.

I’d totally forgotten about that until yesterday, when the same thing happened again. Fortunately, now I work at home, alone, with no one to ask me if I can stick out my tongue straight except the dog, and come to think of it, she doesn’t talk no matter how dizzy I get.
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You know that old routine with the damsel and the villain where he says, “You must pay the rent!” and she says, “I can’t pay the rent!” and they go back and forth until the swarthy hero appears and says, “I’ll pay the rent!”? That’s sort of the conversation that goes on in my head about volunteering at my kids’ schools. Except that I’m both the villain and the damsel, and no one ever swoops in and offers to pay my rent.

Okay, maybe it’s a lousy metaphor.

Except that it’s not, because I’ve always said that one of the biggest perks of working from home is that I’m free to be really involved in my kids’ activities and to pitch in where I’m needed. When we moved to Georgia two years ago I dove in head-first: PTA, other parent committees, classroom volunteer, event staff for various school functions, etc. I was happy to be able to do it.

Until I started resenting it all.
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If you’ve been around the female blogosphere this week you’ve likely noticed that there are a lot of posts about next week’s BlogHer conference. How to prepare mentally. What to wear. What to bring. Which parties to attend. And the angst; lord, the angst over it all. I feel like someone put me in a time machine and plunked me back down in my dorm room, circa 1989, when most of my fellow freshmen were freaking out about sorority rush.

Does the world need another “Stop freaking out about BlogHer!” post? Probably not.

Am I going to write one anyway? Why yes. Yes, I am.

Because, seriously, the level of freak-out I see happening around me is just making me sad for y’all. When I read these angst-laden posts, I wonder why people are even going, if they’re that anxious about it. So. Stop! Breathe! And then read this.
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It’s like any other morning here in my office—the kids are still asleep, I’m sitting here in my pajamas, coffee by my side, tapping away on my computer.

But actually, this is unlike any other morning in my office, because today I’m sitting in a camper in the Adirondack mountains, 1100 miles from home, and the sleeping children are about ten feet away on their bunks (and thankfully they slept through me banging around our tiny kitchen, figuring out how to use my new French press). We’re at a very nice KOA campground that has free wireless, which is a Very Good Thing because it turns out that there’s no cellular signal up here to speak of. And that means my MiFi is useless.

Today we’ll go hiking and maybe fishing, and the grown-ups will sit around chatting while the children run off to play, and I will marvel over the fact that I can sit in the midst of it and both relax and get some work done as needed.

Here’s the nitty gritty on how my mobile set-up is working for me:
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Did you shop this past holiday weekend? Did you check out the Thanksgiving Door Busters, the Black Friday Deals, the Weekend Bargains, and the Cyber Monday Specials?

I did. And I wasn’t even shopping for me.

I’ve been running Want Not for about two and a half years, now, and there’s one thing I’m finally learning: There’s nothing that will ruin my love of shopping more than the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. It’s exhausting, trying to track all of those deals in the space of just a few days. I worked harder and longer hours this past long weekend than I have all year. And I wasn’t even shopping for myself!

I’m all shopped out.
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So in my last post, I talked about the impossibility of concentrating on election day. If only I could get through that, I could get back on track. Or so I told myself.

But then yesterday, well, I was exhausted. We’d stayed up late watching the election returns and the speeches, and yesterday I drank a lot of coffee and dragged around trying to get work done. All of the work I hadn’t managed to do the previous day, and all of the work I needed to do yesterday. While exhausted. Some of my finest stuff, right there. (Or not.)

Today I have to do all of the stuff I didn’t get done from the previous two days, as well as what I should be doing today, and I have to say—I think I’m experiencing PESL.
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In light of my last post, I thought it might make sense to talk about a way in which my family has been affected by the changing economy.

And while I’m not going to cheer for the rising costs of groceries, or anything, I definitely do see this one as a blessing in disguise: After a few months of out-of-control food spending, we made the decision to start planning out our meals and only going to the store once a week.

Now, sure, I’d always sort of planned meals, you know, in the theoretical, “hey, this is on sale and I could make that recipe with it” sort of way, but I’d never planned a week’s menu and shopped specifically for it. No, I was always running out to the store for that one ingredient I needed or—worse!—crying uncle and ordering a pizza on a busy day because I just never managed to figure out dinner.
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