Print, Fax, and Scan, Oh My!

Um, okay, so I think we should dub October (and the first part of November) the month-of-inconsistent-blogging. The record of posts is absolutely pathetic. My excuse? A snowstorm of projects, a trip to Texas, a wedding, a death in the family (poor Yeti-dog), a presidential election (congratulations Barack), and, of course, True Blood. Yes, it would accurate to say that it's been ONE HELL OF A 30 DAYS. But I'm glad to say that I'm back.

I took the whole weekend off this weekend. I watched t.v. Had breakfast with the hubster. Threw the ball with the Quinn-dog. Almost didn't check my email. It was great. Hadn't had a weekend off in....weeks.

However, I had time to think about things like: the fact that my house is a mess, and I need to buy my Christmas cards, and I need to start going to the gym beFORE new year's resolution season.

With that, I had today all planned out. Up, gym, home, breakfast, shower, and work, work, work. Take the dog for a walk, cook dinner, more laundry, you know the drill. Domestic diva type shenanigans.

Instead I slept until 7:45. And then watched Good Morning America until 10am, then decided to rearrange my office until noon. I am officially the queen of procrastination.

Truthfully, the only thing that makes my office an 'office' is the fact that I sometimes work in there and it houses my laptop. Sometimes. It doesn't have a fax machine, or a phone, or a printer, or any of that officey stuff. Of which I am CONSTANTLY reminded because clients are always wanting me to scan, fax, and creatively transmit various documents. Ugh.

I am in total resistant to this crap. And I don't know why. It's perfectly logical for them to assume that I--a professional--would have a fully equipped office. Alas, I do not.

I say that I don't have a printer for 'environmental reasons,' which is almost true. Printers almost always lead to obsessive and unnecessary printing. But the truth is that I'm too cheap and lazy to get all this stuff.

Like today, the account at one of my client's office sends me this fancy schmancy W-9 form. It was like a living thing...which is why I couldn't operate it. I wrote her to tell her as much and I could hear the irritation in her response: 'You're going to have to print it and sign, and then fax, scan and email, or mail it.'

Ugh. This will take up my whole Tuesday.

Am I alone in my unwillingness to print, fax, and scan? Am I just being a baby? I think I already know the answer. Just thought I'd check anyway.

I'm BACK and Ginny Woolf

I do feel a little bit guilty as I have not been very attentive to this here blog. I haven't been attending to its basic needs which are...posts. A blog just isn't a blog without posts. But the time has finally arrived and I am now--officially--free of the day job shennanigans. I work when I want with the people I want where I want. There's not much to complain about these days and I should have plenty of time for postings. Awesome.

One of the coolest things about working from home is that you get to have a home office. You also get tons of tax benefits, but they pale in comparison to the excitement of the home office. See, my first day on the job wasn't very productive, mostly because my office was a ghastly mess and I couldn't even begin to think in there. With that, I temporarily had to share work spaces with my husband. After a day of zero--and I do mean ZERO--productivity, I knew that this 'work' could not continue until I had a room of my own that even Virginia Woolf would be proud of.

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," that's what she said. Well, I'm not writing fiction...yet, but I am writing and these days, my home office is my favorite room in the house. In the last five days, I've spent almost 100% of my waking time in this room. Yeah, I love it. And I actually look forward to working because it means I get to be in my ultra-cool space.

In this room, I get to cram all of my coolest Craigslist finds. (Aside: I will never, ever, ever buy brand new furniture. It's over-priced and it doesn't have near the character that my 'garage sale' pieces have. Plus, recycling furniture is a fun and creative way to live green.) For example, my gold velour wing chair with about a million tufts that I bought from a newly-divorced gal in Cotati for $35. Or my gold-leaf, Italianate nesting tables that I got at Skip Domingo's Auction for $10. Or my two ultra-chic, fire engine red, flow form chairs that I've paired with the Duncan Fyfe-esque drop leaf table, er, desk that I bought for $30 dollars from a gal in Santa Rosa as she was getting ready to move to the Big Apple. My husband calls it clash-tastic, I call it eclectic.

Don't work from home but still kind of want your 'own room' to do artsy fartsy stuff like knit, paint, write, make collages from old Vogue issues, or--Heaven forbid--scrap book? Associate editor Amy Shearn for Dominomag.com has some great tips for making your own creative space and gives all the necessary props to Ginny for thinking of the idea in the first place. (This website/magazine ROCKS, guys. It's where I found inspiration for my own room. Check it out!)

Pretty cool, huh? By the way, if anybody spies an original Saarinen tulip chair like the one in the picture and/or an original tulip dining table for a reasonable price on SF Bay Area Craigslist, holler at me. Happy space-making!

All play, no work...

So the countdown has begun. I have officially twelve and one half days left in the office. If you've spoken to me within the last year and half since I entered the workforce, you've probably heard me complain pathetically about it--the workforce that is. I'm done, folks. Which is why I'm now a proud member of the freelance world and so far, things are looking up. Here's why:

So last week, I went to Scottsdale, Arizona for one of my new writing clients, um, that has now become my favorite client, for the record. Scottsdale is apparently the next LA in case you haven't heard. I'm a small town girl that loves a bargain, which is why I almost wet my britches when I learned that after arriving in Phoenix, a lovely car was going to pick me up and deliver me to my hotel, the Kierland Westin. Nice.

Little did I know that the chauffeur and fancy hotel goodness was just the beginning. After a sprinkling of work, we head over to our dinner location, Mastro's Ocean Club. Mind you, there are no oceans even close to Scottsdale, they can dream. This place is 'fly', folks. So fancy, in fact, that a lovely young lady hands you a towel after washing your hands in the bathroom. I'm a spry, able-bodied young woman and can reach the eight inches for my own towel, but that's beside the point. Maybe she's just there to ensure that you do indeed wash your hands, but I was impressed just the same.

We're there with about fifteen or so of their top people and for a bunch of over achievers, these people know to party. The wait staff is passing around the tequila shots before they've even placed the bread baskets. I'm thinking it could be a long night when the CEO stands and declares that he's going to make 'a few toasts' and informs the wait staff that as he's doing this, a few people might consume their shot of Patron tequila and when they do, to promptly bring them another one. Yikes.

So we're about a third of the way around the table for toasts/introductions and I'm plastered. The gentleman next to me and myself have cleaned, and I do mean CLEANED, our side of the chilled seafood tower--shrimp, lobster, crab legs, etc--and he is nonchalantly rotating the dish in microscopic increments so that the people across from us don't notice that we're mining for any errant shrimp that they, technically, are entitled to. And they haven't even taken our order yet. Not to mention, he keeps reporting me to the waiter every time he's sees that my shot glass is empty.

And the next night, we did it all over again at Barcelona. How awesome is that? I almost feel guilty to charge them. After two days in Scottsdale, I was two pounds heavier than when I arrived. Not good.