When the salt mine is home

I love the fact that I have a home office where I occupy myself with the daily tasks of writing, blogging and social networking in order to promote the writing and blogging.

But the most difficult part of a home office is that it's located at home.

It's not the distractions that are bothersome. I don't have a fix-it bone in my body, so I'm neither compelled nor distracted to do anything related to painting or fixing a leaky faucet or changing the filter in the furnace or anything like that. I'm fairly disciplined about the tasks at hand. I approach the writing with a deadline in mind, the way I did as a reporter in what seems like a lifetime ago.

I have a few distractions -- the guitars and piano in the office that beg to be played. I can call up Fancast on my computer and watch old episodes of "Spenser: For Hire" with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks. I can cruise the web to my heart's delight, all in the name of research.

The real problem with working at home isn't the occasional distraction, it's the fact you're home all the time.

I used to have a salt mine to go to every day. You know the drill: You get up each morning and prepare to commute to the salt mine to do battle in the work-a-day world of meetings, telephone calls, emails, fires to put out, action plans to strategize. After a day in the mine, you'd return to your sanctuary, your home, the place of rest and rejuvenation.

But now when I commute to the office it's down the hall and to the right. I can do the commute in my jammies and flip-flops, carrying the mug of coffee I just poured in the kitchen. There's no official start time, and there's no official quitting time. The rest and rejuvenation of being home gets a little muddy as it mixes with the need to wander into the office to check my DIGG account after dinner to see how much activity there's been through the day.

There is no rest for the home office weary.

Which is why I can't wait to get out of the house. I look forward to the walk to the end of the driveway to get the morning newspapers. The same is true in the afternoon when I walk out to get the mail. When I go to the gym I extend my workout far longer than I ever did when I was working at an office.

This need sometimes competes with my wife Jane's needs. By the weekend, I'll have a need to escape from the house where I've been at work all week, while she'll have a need to nest in the house because she has a salt mine that she's been going to during the week.

We are scheduled to be away this weekend and next. I am looking forward to packing a bag, pulling together my toiletries, picking out a book for the road. I won't miss the home office for a few days, but I'll bring along the laptop and Blackberry to write and blog and network when I get the chance. When you have a home office, you can leave the home but sometimes the office has to travel.

Awakening the hermit gene

By the second day of a conference I attended recently I was flat-out exhausted.

I figured it was because of the overindulging in food and drink on the first night of the conference. My butt was definitely dragging the next day, and I figured I was just out of shape when it came to overindulging in food and drink.

My wife Jane, however, insisted I was exhausted from being with people again. She surmised that I was out of shape when it came to interpersonal interaction and that dealing with so many people tuckered me out.

She's correct that I don't get out much ... retirement and working from home will do that to you.

There are days when, if not for talking to Jane in the morning before she leaves for work and in the evening when she comes home, I don't speak a word to anyone.

This is a far cry from the way it used to be when I'd go to an office and have meetings, and make and take telephone calls, and engage in my favorite practice of managing while walking around.

Now when I go to work it's down the hall in the house and when I walk around it's an empty nest.

Frankly, I don't mind it much.

Jane calls it the hermit gene. She believes that buried in each of us is the desire to be alone and be left alone. I don't miss the stress that sometimes came from the office-related interactions.

I communicate a lot from my home office but the words are almost exclusively written, not spoken. There are the web sites -- Boomer Angst, Eats@Home and Examiner.com -- to feed with words.

But there are also the social networks at Facebook, DIGG, LinkedIn and AARP and the various Google Groups to keep up with. We talk a lot to each other; we just don't say anything out loud to each other.

Social networks are often the talk of the day, not only for professional shut-ins such as myself but for people who work at jobs and who have plenty of people to speak to on a day to day basis. Between Facebook and MySpace, two of the most popular social network sites, there are about 200 million users.

We share comments, photos, and videos. We share stuff we've read online with each other. We have common interests in family or schools or work or mutual friends. We share a lot or we share a little. We share the important and we share the mundane. And it's all done without speaking a word.

So maybe I'm a little out of practice when it comes to social gatherings where the interaction is up close and personal, when it involves body language and spoken language. But since I'm interacting on the social networks and don't think I've gone totally hermit ... at least not yet.

One Boomer for Obama

Under the headline "A generation comes of age" in January 1993, I wrote how happy I was that Bill Clinton, a fellow Baby Boomer, was finally in charge with his election as president.

"Now we call the shots," I wrote. "Now the baby boomers are in control."

Clinton was 46 at the time. Much of his cabinet was in its 40s or late 30s. I was 39, in charge of the local newspaper.

In the 16 years hence, another Baby Boomer -- George Bush -- was elected as president. We've gone through and are going through another cycle of war and another cycle of economic turmoil. Clinton, 62, is retired from office. I'm 55 and retired.

I wrote at the time: "The baby boomers now stand at the plate. If we whiff, it'll be our fault." There's a lot of debate today that we did strike out, that the Baby Boomer legacy on politics and society is more bane than boon. I don't see it that way, but, as with everything, history is the ultimate judge.

I write this because we have the power to create another generational shift of who's in charge, who's in control. And my hope for the person to lead the way is Barack Obama.

Technically, he's a Baby Boomer, born Aug. 4, 1961. Demographers define 1946 to 1964 as the Baby Boom era. But Obama disdains the Boomer label. He is a Baby Boomer not-wannabe. In fact, he is part of the so-called Generation Jones, that portion of Baby Boomers who don't relate at all to the Baby Boomers that came of age during the 1960s and '70s.

As Clinton did in his day, Obama has the potential in 2009 and beyond of offering substantive change in the way government sees itself and in its mission to its citizens and to the rest of the world.

Certainly, I don't cast my vote according to who was born when. I favored the older John McCain over the younger George Bush. But what I see here is a necessary shift, the passing of the torch.

I stumbled across a couple of authors -- Morley Winograd and Michael Hais -- who explained it best in a Washingtonpost.com piece from early this year. They described a speech that Obama gave in Selma, Ala., in which he delineated the Boomer generation from the one that followed, the Millennials. The Boomers, Obama told the crowd, were the "Moses generation" that led the children of Israel out of slavery; the Millennials were the "Joshua generation" that established the kingdom of Israel.

"The first was a generation of idealists and dreamers," wrote Winograd and Hais, "the second a generation of doers and builders."

History, they said, shows an 80-year cycle in which a civic generation like the Millennials emerges to recreate the country after the upheaval caused by the generation of idealists.

I'm ready to cede control to Obama and his legion of Millennials. As I look at my own Millennials -- my daughter Elizabeth and son David -- I'm assured I'll be in good hands.

How low can you go?

There is a rite of passage here in the Northeast as the days get shorter, as the peak color of fall starts to fade, as the temperature starts to dip: Just how far into autumn can you go before you turn on the heat in the house?

My wife Jane and I started talking about this recently and, all things considered, we decided we want to try to wait until Nov. 1. With the price of everything rising, especially the cost of heating a home, we made a pact to keep the heat off through the rest of this month.

This is not easy. I've come close to being a cheating husband.

Time was, getting to Nov. 1 without heating the house would be difficult but not impossible. Jane would head off to her work, where someone else was paying the heat. I would head off to my work, where someone else was paying the heat.

Jane still heads off to work. But now, when I head off to work, I go down the hall and to the right.

Having retired from work and having retired to a home office means I'm stuck working in the unheated house, which hasn't been bad to date, though I almost strayed on Wednesday.

Overnight Tuesday got pretty cold in these parts and while it dawned sunny on Wednesday, it was still cold through the morning as I went through my morning routine of writing and posting to Eats@Home and Examiner.com.

Our house has a couple of issues. One of our issues is that the house is surrounded by towering pines. And with the sun not rising in the sky very high and with temps getting down into the high 30s, the house doesn't have a natural way to warm up. In addition we have a three-tiered heating system -- gas in some areas of the house, electric heat in other parts, nothing in other parts. We also have a woodstove, which we need to use more but I have the same concerns about me and fire that I have with me and chainsaws and power tools in general -- something catastrophic is destined to happen.

So by lunch time I was going to do one of two things: turn on the electric heat in my office or get the hell out of the house to someplace where someone else pays the heat.

Wanting desperately to hold to my vow of no-heat fidelity, I bundled myself and my laptop up in the car at about 12:30, cranked up the heat and headed off to the library where I found a comfy seat, an electrical outlet and a wi-fi connection … all the comforts of home without the discomforts of home.

I'm not sure just how low we can go temperature wise before we break. But I'm optimistic. During the week, Jane has work; I have the library. On weekends, we could visit family who don't have a no-heat pacts. And at least the seven-day forecast looks good.

And by the way, is using an electric blanket at night on the bed cheating? If so, at least the wife and I are cheating together.

Let us pray ... or something

It's time to go to church ... time to light votive candles ... time to get seriously spiritual. The Red Sox are in the playoffs.

Those of us who are Red Sox fans -- who are citizens in good standing of Red Sox Nation -- get especially religious at this time of year . We invoke the name of the Almighty in an effort to get the higher power infused in our bats and our fielding and our pitching. It doesn't help that our first round opponents are known as the Angels.

Granted, there are times when we invoke the name of the Almighty in ways that aren't so holy, but that's what this team does to us. We do this because we've been here before in the playoffs and it hasn't been pretty

I saw on television what happened with Bucky Freakin' Dent in 1978 American League division race playoff game and it wasn't pretty. I saw what happened with Billy Buckner in the 1986 World Series and it wasn't pretty. I saw what happened with Aaron Freakin' Boone in the 2003 American League championship series. Not pretty is an understatement ... it was ugly, ugly, ugly.

We yelled at the television -- screamed I tell you -- at Grady Little to take out Pedro Martinez as Petey began to implode on the mound at Yankee Stadium in the 2003 American League Championship Series. I'm still hoarse from that one.

Sure, we accept and are thankful for the World Series championships in 2004 and 2007. They were life fulfilling and life affirming dreams for many people. The 2004 World Series supposedly broke an 86-year-old curse originally brought on by the Sox sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919.

But the true Red Sox fan, while he or she may no longer live with The Curse, lives with a sense of The Dread. We can be Catholic or Jewish, Methodist or Muslim, Baptist or Buddhist, agnostic or atheist, we all share the Red Sox religion of Dread in the true Calvinist tradition that only through suffering can we find salvation.

Newer citizens of Red Sox Nation, those who took their oath of citizenship after the championship in 2004, expect the team to win in the post-season. They see winning in the post season as part of the natural course of events: the sun will rise, the Red Sox will win. Hey, they said, they did it in 2004 and again in 2007 ... no sweat.

Older Red Sox Nation citizens, however, expect the team to lose. We hope for the best, pray for the best, are willing to sell our internal organs in hopes of the best, but we expect the worst. That's our conditioning. That's how Dent and Buckner and Boone and Little and many others taught us to be.

We are consumed with The Dread that injury to key players might be this year's Achilles heel:

Josh Beckett -- oblique

J.D. Drew -- back spasms

Mike Lowell -- hip flexor

Dice-K (pictured above) -- the fact that he throws too many balls

I know, I know. Technically, throwing balls instead of strikes isn't an injury, but that's how deep The Dread can run in the veins of those of us who worry too much.

Am I feeling less of The Dread as a result of Wednesday night's first game 4-1 win against the Anaheim Angels?

No, it's a long October.

All together now: "Our Father, who art in heaven ..."