on the downslide...

It is Thursday, noon, of my first full week back at work since late June. It is safe to say, I'm going to make it, after all ;)

Being back at work has been...fine, I guess. Actually being here has certainly been fine. It is everything else that has taken some getting used to again. Menu planning. Running errands at lunch or in the evening. Packing lunches. Waking Sadie. Getting the girls dressed, fed, and out the door on a schedule. Squeezing my summer stretched feet back into work-appropriate shoes. Showering first thing in the morning, instead of after the beach. Blowdrying my hair. Wearing makeup.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment is apportioning my/our free time. It is so easy to get used to having loads of it, so that planning things to do is a happy diversion. After a week at work, I'm looking forward to just relaxing, hitting the beach, and trying to recapture a bit of that 'endless summer' feeling of vacation. Unfortunately, that isn't in the stars for us, at least not this weekend. Because I have a hard time saying no, and because I really want to do the things we get invited to, I have managed to overschedule us for the next three or four days.

Tonight we're meeting friends for "Jazz in the Park" in Red Bank. Saturday we are going to a friend's surprise 40th birthday party down near Philly. Sunday evening we're going to a cookout up at my mom's house because my aunt and uncle and cousins are coming down. We've just been invited to a pool party up in NoNJ for Sunday afternoon. If we go to that, we'll have no beach time at all...I'm sure I'll be wiped out by the time I'm back here Monday morning. Oh, and did I mention that I'm going to a neighborhood GNO event Monday night?!?!? sigh. It was so much easier when 'every day was Saturday'.

such is the plight of us worker bees, I suppose.

Life is Different Now

I was thinking this morning about how different things are for me (professionally) in a way I couldn't have imagined back when I was in the thick of life in the corporate sector during the dot com era. You know... scores of young, attractive and hip coworkers (the men with their long sideburns, the women wearing stilletto heels and all black, and all members of both sexes wearing the requite black, plastic, clunky-framed eyeglasses that were everywhere in the late '90's). Everyone sitting at their ultra-modern desks, tapping away at their laptops, or answering their incessantly ringing cellphones (saying "oh, sorry, I need to take this..." with an air of self-importance). Or, playing foozeball or pingpong (because it seemed that every office in Boston had one in those days) and planning the 'team offsite' (that would be company-sanctioned meetings at the pub next door during happy hour). And that ubiquitous feeling that WHAT WE ARE DOING IS GOING TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY PEOPLE (fill in the blank) that every company seemed to have back then.

Yeah, it's kind of different now. My coworkers wear a lot of khaki and pleated-front pants. The calls that they have to take in the middle of a meeting are more likely than not from a babysitter or a child. They drive minivans. They eat at the Olive Garden. As an organization, our mission seems to be more about 'getting the work done and getting the heck out of here by 5 on the nose', than about revolutionizing anything.

I don't know if this will be the place for me forever, but for now, it's a very 'mom-friendly' job, and I'm staying put. It's just funny to think about how you never know where you'll be in five or ten years. Certainly, back in 1999, as I sat and watched the view out of my office window from 54 Canal Street, I couldn't have imagined myself here. Yet somehow, it feels like the right place to be now.