I have heard Red's lament and I must add my small voice to the chorus.
I don't have as monstrous a commute. I don't wear any clothes on a regular basis that require dry cleaning. I do work for a software company in Silicon Valley.
Before the bubble went *pfft*, we were are working our brains out because our product was going to change the world and our net worth was going to bulge at the seams from all the money that investors were going to shovel our way. Even lowly tech writers caught a glimmer of that dream. Now we're all working our asses off to stay alive and to demonstrate to the company why they should axe the guy in the next cube instead of you.
Such is life.
Luckily, I never really bought completely into the insanity. I've always been happy working at a job that I like. The cash bonuses and option grants popped up every once in a while as nice incidentals, but not much more than that.
Long hours are the order of the day. Executives and managers generally regard weekends as buffers in the development schedule, ready to be swallowed up when things take longer than planned, which they always do.
In addition to work, my wife and I own a fixer-upper. Nobody ever really abused the place, but in its 20-odd years as a rental, no one really loved it either. Everything in the house was maintained in the cheapest, quickest way possible. Kitchen looks a little tired? Slather another thick layer of paint over that solid oak cabinetry! Floors getting a bit beat? Lay yet another layer of nasty, 70s-style vinyl tiles on top of the two already in place.
I hate wallpaper.
Oh, and the cherry on top of this whole busy lifestyle thing: our son.
We're damned lucky to have such an easy going guy. He eats well. He sleeps through the night. He usually manages to entertain himself if we're busy. Still, he's a baby. Babies have needs. A lot of the time those needs conflict with cooking dinner, changing the oil in the car, pruning the roses, or painting the front doors.
Such is life.
We slowly chip away at the things we can. Take today for example. This morning I removed our entryway doors so that I could spray the final coat of white enamel on their inside face. This last coat crowns at least three weekends of effort: three coats of dark green on the outside, removing both door for each coat, letting the paint dry at leat seven hours, staining and finishing the oak threshold, filling in screw holes with glue and toothpicks to fix the messy job done by the installer, and hours of masking off the doors and glass with tape and plastic.
I've known all week that I need to paint this last coat. I've also been more than a little depressed all week about the condition of my little commuting Honda: dusty interior, shredded seat cover, and badly in need of a wash.
As I was wrestling with the hinge pins, my beautiful wife, bless her heart, plopped our dude in his play pen, marched outside with a bucket, and washed my car.
Now that I've finished the doors, I feel free… free to put the finishing touches on our bonus room, continue remodeling our bathroom, changing the oil, ad infinitum.
So in the end, we only have friends over who will understand why the house isn't as spotless as it could be. Folks will just have to deal with a guest bathroom that doesn't have any wallboard up.
Pakeha