More productivity than you can measure

So, this first "work at home" week has been a good one. It's nearly over, and in spite of the fact that my company has changed my e-mail address and apparently this has caused me to lose access to most of the cool systems like time-sheet entry and software downloading, my spirits are high. I figure if they can break it in a week, they can fix it in a week, too. There was apparently another woman already working for said employer who has my name, and since the e-mail addresses are standardized on a firstname.lastname sort of convention, I gummed up the works when I was hired. This is why the HR department called me a couple days before I got my offer letter to ask me about how I wanted my e-mail spelled... It's not that my name is all that complicated or that they didn't have it written down somewhere. It's that they had to use some alternate version, and since that's not standardized, they were asking for my preference.

Anyway, the alternative I chose didn't work out so well, and was causing all sorts of access conflicts for the original employee, so they changed my e-mail address to one of my less-favored alternatives. I don't mind, but I was kinda hoping to avoid that simply because there is one very common spelling of my first name, and -- well, that's not the one I use. I do use the second most common spelling, but that's my Dad's doing. If my Mom had had her way, I would use the more common one. In fact, she taught me how to spell my name her way when I was a wee tyke. Then, when I was about 6 or so and I discovered that she had taught me a different spelling from what was on my birth certificate, I was livid as only a 6-year-old-going-on-17 can be. I don't know how long this went on for, but there was a period in which I wrote out my full name, as it appears on my birth certificate, on every single school paper I had to hand in. I eventually got tired of it and went back to heading my papers with my (much shorter) nickname, but it seems this name thing has always been an issue for me.

Anyway, for all I was afraid of it, I managed to get nearly all my laundry done in the last two days. I only have two loads left to do, and then I need to find the time to fold them all. As it is, there's a huge pile of clean clothes on my couch. Any volunteers?

The kitchen, also, has received a dose of much-needed attention. I've cleaned out all the science projects from my fridge, set my tofu to marinate, washed up all my dishes, watered all my plants, and ground beans for tomorrow's coffee. Whee! The cool thing is that I get most of this stuff done at lunchtime, or just on the break between work and dinner. So I'm not "shorting" my work any hours, and I'm not eating up all my social time with it, either. Not that it would hurt me to spend a little less social time and a little more home time for a while... I feel a little out of balance lately. But that, gentle readers, is a whole other blog.