My new corner office - and the job to go with it.
January 1, 2009
The Feminists lied to me!
As a child of the late 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with the general understanding that housekeeping was what a woman did if she lacked the education, ambition, or intelligence to do anything else. Running a household was the most mindless thing a woman could do. Of course we could work 80 hours a week and slip in a little housework here and there. No big deal, right?
Ha!
I’ve done both. Ok, maybe I’ve never pulled an 80-hour work week. Not even in the late 90’s when you had to put in 80-hour work weeks before the cool geeks would even give you the time of day. Sorry, I guess I missed out on that bit of geek cred. I kinda like sleep occasionally. But I’ve been a working mother with a corporate job, a work-at-home Mom running my own businesses, and even (for brief periods) a stay-at-home Mom with no outside work responsibilities.
Anybody who tells you that managing a household is mindless has never actually done it. Running a household - at least a household like mine! - is like negotiating Middle East peace, balancing the federal budget, running a corporation, and changing blow-out diapers, all at the same time at 4 AM on the day after Thanksgiving at WalMart.
For quite some time, I’ve been operating under the idea that if I could only get things to a baseline, get everything organized and figured out, life would run smoothly. Unfortunately, I really need peace and quiet to do that kind of thinking, and well…that’s a pretty rare commodity around here. Rather than giving up on the idea and just accepting life as one crisis after another, I’m trying another tactic:
I’ve taken a new job: CEO of Ballad Family, Inc.
Responsibilities include oversight of various divisions including Education, Food Service, Accounting, Human Resources, and Site Maintenance.
Salary: $1000 per month.
According to the budget, there should be about $1000 left over at the end of every month. So why have we been living paycheck to paycheck? I have no idea. I can’t even begin to tell you where that $1000 goes every month. So, that’s my first goal. To accurately track our budget, eliminate waste, and stick that $1000 into a savings account where it can’t go wandering off. To achieve this, I’ll need to examine each area of this operation and streamline it.
I’ll be sharing my progress with you, in the hopes that what I’m doing will inspire and give you some practical tools to use in your own household.
And yes, I even have a corner office. My Christmas present from DH was a complete re-organizatin of our bedroom. What was once a storage and sleeping room is now an oasis of order! I’ll post more about that on Tuesday, when I re-join Tackle it Tuesdays.
Posted by Tricia @ 7:05 am in Budget help, Family Organization
I sympathize with you. I feel that I really need an hour of peace and quiet to get started on anything and that is so rare hardly anything gets started. Congratulations on your new corner office!
January 1st, 2009 at 9:24 am
My hour comes between 5-6 AM. I’m not a morning person, but I’m finding that if I don’t spend that hour first thing, I feel behind all day.
January 1st, 2009 at 12:16 pm