shirkaholic

There are some hidden perils to working at home and making your own schedule. As many of us can attest -- Fiona first among them -- the worker-at-home can all too easily fall into the trap of working all the time.

I, of course, try to balance this by being constantly signed in to several e-mail and chat programs and studiously avoiding everything I truly should be doing.

But in all seriousness, I definitely have let myself slide into working at any and all hours, every day of the week. The only days I currently don't teach at all are Tuesday and Wednesday, so I generally devote a large chunk of those days to complete curriculum work or other class preparation. When I come home from SAT class on Saturdays and Sundays, I often set to work on more Kaplan items. Although my Drama Kids classes on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays don't start until after school, I generally spend pre-class time reviewing the day's lesson and thinking about how to accomodate an ever-changing roster of attendees (curse you, Cold and Flu Season!).

This spirals out of control. It may not seem so detrimental to the soul on the surface, but trust me -- there comes a moment, when, even though I don't keep normal work days and hours, I find that something like three weeks have passed without a single day wherein I did nothing that contributed to my earning power, and I sort of want to throw my checkbook out the window and run and hide.

Today was one of those days.

However, I saw it coming, and this time I was careful. This time, I decided to put to good use my husband's phenomenal birthday gift to me: a day at the spa.

I booked a massage, followed by a facial. I made sure I had no pressing engagements, and for the first time ever, I had two solid hours of total pampering.

I came home and make myself a lovely lunch. Then, I relaxed on the couch for a while, trying to avoid feeling guilty for not glue-gunning the puppets for tomorrow's class (I'll do it in the morning), and finally headed to the shower to transform my hair from randomly-growing-out highlighted to "Suede" light brown that was on sale for less than $6, and since it's only demi-permanent, that was good enough for me.

All told, it's been a rather impressively wonderful day of doing nothing. The only damper is that the friends with whom we had dinner plans had to reschedule -- but, in keeping with my not having any responsibility today, my adorable husband has elected that we shall go out to dinner anyway. We even have a little something to celebrate: His year-end bonus, which, since it was delivered today, might even be considered payment for my doing nothing.