February 3, 2024

I started this series on January 1st of this year. A way to express ideas and share thoughts (and heck, maybe even connect with someone else who has similar ideas and thoughts, or who just finds my words relatable or entertaining). And this little jolt of a desire to write it all out usually comes in the morning, while I’m drinking coffee and sitting at the dining room table with my laptop.

I have an office here in the house. A designated space for my computer, laptop, camera gear, etc. A designated space for me to actually sit in while I work. But I usually choose to spend most of my work time out in the house. At the dining room table, sometimes even on the couch. I blame the laptop. Or maybe just my desire to not feel alone, to be out and about around everyone, or everything.

My work days, or at least the days that I consider my “office time”, are Monday-Friday, 8:30am to 3:00pm, while the kids are in school. Brian is at work in Morgantown during this time so there’s no one here, just our stuff, in various rooms. The “everything” that I like to be around instead of sitting in my office. 

How’s about this? The kids haven’t had a normal week of school since the new year started. Scheduled teacher work days, parent-teacher conferences, weather delays, virtual school days, and school closings because of snow left them with five weeks of irregularity. Not one week of five full days of school. So I did some entrepreneur math.

I have about 32.5 hours of “office time” or work hours each week. Remember, kids in school = office time. When they don’t have school, my work is interrupted. They don’t need me like they used to, but I can’t just ignore them and sit on my laptop all day. So while I’m still able to get some work done when they’re not in school, it’s definitely not a full day’s work. 

So I estimate, that because of all the aforementioned reasons for school irregularity, I lost 20 hours of work in the month of January. That’s 60% of one week’s work lost. I could have edited 13 session collections and two large wedding collections in that time.

Thankfully, it’s my “off season” or downtime, so the workload isn’t heavy. But it means there’s not a ton of extra time to work on the “extra” stuff. To work beyond editing sessions and weddings. I have a new website that needs continued polishing (take a browse around if you haven’t yet). I want to explore creating a new Deep Creek podcast. I have photography education to engage in. I want to amp up my Deep Creek Tour Guide efforts over at FTL. I want to experiment with a film camera.

Unfortunately, the irregularity of school won’t end here, mostly because we live in the #tundraofmaryland and winter weather will likely interrupt our school schedule for at least another two months. It’s a double edged sword. The snow is so beautiful when it’s here and I love taking pictures in it. But if it keeps the kids from going to school, the snow is annoying, ha.

I talked about snow in every other installment of The Morning Coffee. Can’t not talk about it again. And here’s an “artsy fartsy” snow photo I took a couple of weeks ago when we were covered with a foot and a half of snow…