Work From Home Couple

Today is that most dreaded of days, the days when the Christmas tree comes down.

It’s not that I’ll miss the tree — or Christmas — that much. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit tired plugging and unplugging the thing every day. It’s just that I hate the work involved in putting our fake tree away for another 11 months.

Putting the tree up is one thing. Yes, it’s still a pain. But the kids like it, and they’re always eager to help and excited about seeing the ornaments again. Of course, no one is excited about seeing those same ornaments when they’re being put away. And those helpful kids are nowhere to be found.

So up to the attic I’ll go today, with bins of ornaments and Christmas tree parts. The only joy on this day? At least I won’t have to do this again for another 12 months.

Ho, ho, ho.

The last two weeks of December are tough. No one wants to work. I don’t want to work, either. Unfortunately, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid.

That’s one of the challenges when you work for yourself from home: You can take as many days off as you want, but no one’s going to pay you when you don’t turn in your assignments.

Sometimes — rarely, I admit, but sometimes — I envy those folks who do work a traditional office job. These last two weeks of the year, it seems, none of them are working. I should know: Whenever I call them to get a quote or two for my newspaper or magazine feature stories, I only get voice mail. But because they work on salary, they still get paid, whether they’re at home sipping eggnog or at the office slaving away.

Now, when you work for yourself from home, you have to work around all the holiday hubbub. I don’t get my paychecks if I don’t turn in any stories. I can’t afford, especially with as tough a year as 2008 has been, to take two weeks and slack off. I still have to work, which is a drag during the holidays.

This week is especially tough. We have friends in town from Texas. It’d be easy to take these days completely off and play cards, chat and have a beer or two. Unfortunately, I’m working. Now, it’s not a full day of work, but, still, it’s work, and, like I say, it’s a real drag.

Oh, well, the holidays are over soon. Then I can go back to snickering at all those poor souls who have to travel to an office every day.

This holiday season has been a bit rough because my family during its course has lost two people due to cancer. We had our second funeral in as many weeks today.

Both funerals were sad, of course. But today’s particularly struck me. Not because of the emotion involved, but because of the emotion it lacked. The reverend who spoke didn’t know the deceased. No one from the 25 or so attendees got up to say anything. And it was all over in under a half hour.

In contrast, the first funeral we attended, about two weeks ago, was packed. At the wake the day before, people had to wait outside in the cold to get a chance to view the body. On the day of the funeral, the entire church was filled, and at the reception afterward, people lined up for the chance to tell their stories about the deceased.

Is the funeral you have an indication of the type of life you’ve left? That’s a tough one. Both deceased were good, kind people. One was more vivacious, immersed himself in his family and his community and made everyone he spoke to feel like they were the most important person in the world.

It’s hard not to imagine your own funeral at times like this. It’s hard not to hope, either, that yours is like that first one I attended two weeks ago, and not the one where the only personal item the reverend speaking could include was that the deceased was feisty.

You’ll be reading in the papers this week that we just suffered through a bad holiday season. Retail sales were down during the season, somewhere around 5.5 percent to 8 percent.

But does that make this a truly bad holiday season? I mean we can’t always spend more than we did the year before can we? There has to be some limit to the amount of money we as a country fritter away during the holidays.

Think about this. It’s only three days after Christmas as I write this. Do you even remember everything you received for the holiday? I know I can’t, and we made a concerted effort this year to spend less than usual.

I’m not a religious person, at all. But I do think that Christmas has become too much about spending, too much about spending stressful hours searching for that perfect gift. Christmas should be about spending time with family and friends. It should be about taking a much-needed break from work. Instead, it’s about spending, and that’s kind of sad.

Here’s hoping that you had a good holiday season, and that you have a fun New Year’s celebration planned, even though the cash registers didn’t ring quite as loudly this year.

I know a bit about real estate: I’ve written about residential real estate for more than a decade, for newspapers and trade magazines. During this time, real estate agents — and everyone involved with the buying and selling of homes, actually — have been quick to remind me just how important they are.

Agents help buyers purchase homes for a fair price. They help negotiate with sellers. They … Well, I’m sure they do something else. I just don’t know what it is.

As the rains keep coming here in the Midwest, I have this to say in response to all those real estate agents: You’re wrong. You’re not important at all. In fact, you’re rather useless.

I say this because my basement is flooding today. Again. We’ve owned our little house for three years now. This is the fifth time our basement has flooded.

As you may or may not know, sellers are required to disclose when their homes have basements that flood. Our sellers did not disclose this. In fact, they checked a box on the sales contract that said their basement was dry.

Well, either they were incredibly fortunate during the eight years they live here or they’re liars. I opt for the second.

Fine. Problem is, not one of the real estate professionals who helped us buy this house has been able to help us remedy this situation. Our real estate agent did come over the day after our first flood and frowned, tsked and sighed. But she didn’t know what else to do. We contacted the real estate attorney the state of Illinois requires in every housing transaction only to be told by him that it’s probably not worth our time to try to prove in court that our sellers lied. The home inspector who’s supposed to help find things like this was quick to cover his own butt, saying quickly that it was a dry day when he did our inspection. I’ll make sure to schedule our next home inspection, should we buy again, during a deluge.

The frustrating thing is that none of these people — most of whom we paid to look out for our interests — have done a thing to help us now that we actually need them. Sure, they’re all peppy and “helpful” when they’re completing the routine tasks that go with the buying and selling of a home. But when you actually need them to do something they don’t do 1,000 times a day, they shrug their shoulders.

The advice we’ve gotten is that we should just suck it up and pay to have the basement waterproofed. That’s what we are going to do, unfortunately. It’s just a shame that people in the real estate industry are so useless. I guess it’s no surprise that the housing industry is falling apart. For years, the people who worked in it were unethical, corrupt, lazy and stupid. Of course the industry is going to fall apart.

It’s the day after Christmas … and all I want to do is sit around and munch on chocolate Santas, read my new books and watch some DVDs.

Unfortunately, I can’t quite do that.

Yes, I’m not working a normal day today. I am taking it a bit on the easy side. But I’m still turning in some work. I have no other choice: If I don’t write, I don’t get paid, and I have several stories due to editors by the end of the month.

That’s one of the few disadvantages of not working full-time from an office. Office workers, I’m assuming, can take some time off around the holidays. There aren’t too many repercussions.

But for me, the holidays are often a struggle. I still have to get the same amount of work done in December as I do in November or October. It just have to do it while dealing with two weeks were it seems everyone I want to interview is out of town. I have to do it when it seems as if no one is interested in returning my phone calls. And I have to do it when relatives and friends want to drop by during the middle of what would otherwise be the middle of a regular working day.

Don’t get me wrong; I do like the holidays. (Notice I said “like,” not “love.” I can certainly live without some of the forced merriment of the season. I can also survive without the Bill O’Reilys of the world telling us the lie that there is actually some kind of “war on Christmas” going on.) It’s just that sometimes they can wear a work-from-home freelancer out.

And today? Yep, I’m worn out. Terribly.

My wife had a sobering experience on our snowy Christmas Eve here in the Midwest. All of us — my 9-year-old son, my 14-month-old son, our 9-year-old niece, my wife and I — headed out to lunch. My wife had to make a quick stop, though, at the office of one of her bosses.

She showed up at the restaurant after the kids had ordered their pizzas and I had ordered everyone’s drinks. Turns out, she’d had a heart-to-heart with her boss. The woman is older, but not old, maybe in her mid-60s. She’s busy, and active in the community. She runs her own theater.

But she was dreading this year’s Christmas. Her mother had passed away earlier this year. And though her kids were coming home for the holidays, they were bringing along boyfriends, friends and pets. My wife’s boss wasn’t in the holiday spirit; With her mother’s death, whom she missed terribly, she would suddenly become the oldest person in the room. That kind of stinks, I’d think.

She told my wife: “Christmas is for the young.”

I wonder if that’s true. Leading up to Christmas, I certainly felt that way. It’s a drag, isn’t it, fighting the crowds at stores, running around for that last-minute gift? It’s even a pain to get some lottery tickets to throw in a stocking. (I never play the lottery and had no idea you couldn’t pay for them with a debit card. Who knew the lottery cared so much about the customers they fleece?)

But today, after the holiday parties, the shopping and the slow traffic snarled by snowstorms were all over, it was a wonderful Christmas morning here. My 9-year-old son loved his gifts. Our 14-month-old loved the wrapping paper and the empty boxes. My wife and I exchanged some nice, and relatively inexpensive, gifts. We won’t have a huge credit-card bill this season. We spent the day overeating and playing games. So it was a nice, relaxing day.

But I do understand the lament of my wife’s boss. There are times when we all wish we were kids again, right? It was nice to sit back, let the gifts come to you and not worry about any of the added stress and responsibilities that come with Christmas.

Regardless, the holiday season is just about over. New Year’s is left, and my wife has scheduled a New Year’s Day get-together at our house. But somehow New Year’s, no matter what you’re doing, never seems quite as stressful as does Christmas.

I don’t like to rub it in the faces of my friends too much, but sometimes I can’t help it: Working from home beat the pants off working in an office.

Need proof? Spend the week in Chicago, where I live, during a fierce round of snowstorms. Then you’ll see. We’ve had some nasty winter weather this week: Sub-zero temperatures, strong winds and snow, of course, lots and lots of snow. It’s added up to some extremely long commute times.

I have a friend who lives 12 miles from his office. One day this week it took him 2-and-a-half hours to get home. I’m sure he was thrilled, cooped up in that car listening to some lame radio station, that Chicago will have a White Christmas this year.

Meanwhile, that same night, my commute was exactly zero minutes. I was working from home, and my commute meant walking from the kitchen to my office, about three feet away. Can’t beat that.

Yes, there are some pitfalls of working from home: Sometimes you forget to stop working. Other days, your personal life and business life blends together. Others often fail to take your career seriously because you don’t drive into an office every day.

But those are minor nuisances compared with the trials most of my office-working friends face. And those snowstorms this week and last provided just one more example.

My wife came up with a good idea this year for the annual Christmas gift exchange we hold for members of her family. She suggested that everyone limit themselves to $5 gifts as a way to save money in these rough economic times.

You’d be surprised at how tough it is to spend only $5 on someone’s Christmas gift.

(A quick disclaimer: My 9-year-old and 13-month-old sons were disqualified from the $5 minimum. Everyone was free to spend as much on them as they pleased.)

Here’s what I got this year from my in-laws: An M&M dressed as Elvis Christmas ornament. My nephew received a $5 gift card to McDonald’s. My father-in-law unwrapped a stuffed reindeer that sang “Jingle Bells.” My niece received a key chain with a stuffed monkey attached to it. Press the monkey and it screeched.

And so it went.

Now, none of those are exactly stellar Christmas presents. But you know what? They were funny. And they made everyone laugh. All of us can survive without some expensive sweater or perfume or scarf for Christmas. Sometimes a laugh is worth far more than the $5 it cost.

My 9-year-old son and I have a Saturday tradition: At 9 p.m. sharp, we flip on Channel 26 here in Chicago to watch the Svengoolie show.

If you’re not fortunate enough to live near Chicago, I’ll fill you in: Svengoolie is a vampire of some sort who hosts late-night horror movies from a rather cheap-looking set. He’s the kind of horror host who will butt in during the worst of the films he shows to make a wisecrack. He’ll insert goofy sound effects in the middle of a black-and-white clunker’s most inane dialogue. And his show always ends with stage hands tossing rubber chickens at him as he slams his coffin shut.

Anyway, it’s a great way to end a Saturday. And nine times out of 10, Svengoolie’s movies are harmless enough for my 9-year-old son. After all, most of the time, the show broadcasts classics such as Bride of Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Son of Dracula. Frightening for their time, these movies have long since lost their ability to instill nightmares.

But a couple of weeks ago, Svengoolie played a film called I Know What you Did. Let’s just say the film — about some young girls who end up targeted by a killer thanks to some prank phone calls they made — isn’t an appropriate one for 9-year-old eyes. I was fooled: It was in black and white. Usually, when Svengoolie plays a black-and-white movie, it’s harmless.

So … I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the movie’s beginning scenes (I was reading and not watching the screen. Honest.) until I heard some screeching music on the soundtrack. I looked up just in time to see a young woman getting stabbed to death in the shower.

Ooops!

Yes, I jumped up and shut the TV off. And, yes, I did have to contend with my son’s nightmares that evening. I also learned a lesson: Don’t ever take your eyes off that TV. You never know what’s going to show up on it. (Especially when you’re watching a late-night horror show …)