My new corner office - and the job to go with it.   

January 1, 2009 | 2 Comments

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.

Being gentle with yourself - “Blue Monday”   

January 21, 2008 | 5 Comments

Here we are - starting the fourth week of January. One of my goals for this year was to post to this blog three times a week. The last post I put up was on New Year’s Eve!

I got up this morning, turned on the local news and saw the headline “Blue Monday.” Apparently this day is the most depressing day of the whole year - between cold, gray weather, credit card bills coming in from December’s spending splurges, and broken New Year’s Resolutions - suddenly the third Monday of January feels less like a new beginning and more like the first day of a long year of the same old problems as last year.

But that’s the great thing about Monday mornings. It’s always fresh start!

Join me this week in beating the January blues! To get things started, I’m posting my own list of goals for 2008. Please, leave a comment with your own goals - and forget whether you’ve already “blown” them. We’re starting fresh today.

My 2008 Goals:

• Finish writing my nonfiction book, Securing PHP Web Applications (by March)
• Complete edits on Securing PHP Web Applications (by May)
• Write Second Chances, my in-progress novel (around July)
• Implement a steady promotions plan based on the advice of my brilliant publicist, Shauntelle Hamlett of Get Known Promotions including posting to my blog at least twice a week. You’re all witnesses now - I will be posting here on Mondays and Wednesdays at a minimum, and hopefully on Fridays as well.

What are your goals for 2008?