Hermiting

In a lot of ways, I’m feeling fortunate these days. I can do part of my job via telecommuting, which means I can avoid driving several days a week. This flexibility has allowed me to avoid the worst of the I-5 fix delays and use less gas.

I’m grateful for the days I can work from home because I have fewer distractions (other than my blog, of course) and can knock out my projects quickly and efficiently. However, staying at home means limited human interaction, too. I’m a pretty dedicated introvert most of the time, but see the real disadvantages in sitting all alone in my home office, still in my fuzzy slippers at noon. This sort of thing can make you a little wonky.

Like a lot of people this week, I’m feeling a little trapped in the house by the bowl-o-smoke that is the Sacramento air basin. Can you say “nonattainment“? The boyfriend and I were musing last night about how much CO2 and particulate matter is being released into the atmosphere by all these fires, too. How many cars driving how many miles would it take to spew the equivalent amount into the air? Are these fires adding, say, an extra year’s worth of contaminants to our atmosphere? More? The BF mentioned that when Mount St. Helens erupted back in 1980, it spewed something like 540 million tons of ash. I’m curious to know what the equivalent would be if we could compare it to the pollution caused by all of us driving around…

I worked from home yesterday, too, and started feeling a little stir crazy. I really wanted to go for a walk, but every time I went outside, my eyes started to burn slightly. At least the temperature is not stiflingly hot–and I’m thinking of all those hundreds of firefighters out there on the front lines. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be fighting wildfires when it’s 105 or something? Awful.

Anyway, there’s good stuff and bad stuff, and the gloom is kind of getting to me today. (Alarming but true: I’ve got that old Styx song stuck in my head…you know the one: “The headlines read these are the worst of times…” I’m going to try to drive it away with something poppy and upbeat. Suggestions welcome.)

If I sit and ponder it long enough, I can really freak myself out. War. Pollution. Unemployment. Gas prices. Not to mention the weak dollar + $1,600 airfare to Italy = canceled trip to Tuscany. School tuition going up. State and local governments considering raising taxes (hello? short-sighted much? ever take an econ class, people?)…RT ridership increasing (yay!), funding decreasing (boo!). See what I mean?

You, too, could turn into a grumpy little hermit if you worked from home. I think I should go into the office tomorrow, if only for the human contact.