Those of you who work at home will sympathize with my dilema.  Working at home with no family can be a very lonely and isolated venture.

I’m a divorced father living alone in a 2 bedroom apartment.  My lovely daughters stay with me every other weekend and I very much look forward to their arrival.  We play games, share stories, watch movies and even go out for meals and bookstore shopping.  I look forward to these times I get to share with my girls.

But when I’m alone I get to work.  I must motivate myself to wake up each morning at a decent hour in order to make some coffee, eat a little breaky, check email, then get to writing.  It’s not always easy.

I’ve always been a procrastinator.  In high school and college I wrote term papers and final dissertations usually the day or night before they were due.  Not a good practice in the professional writing world.  Each writing project I acquire gets assigned a due date on my calendar so I know what must be done by what day.

The problem with that system is that if I have a day or two between project due dates I get complacent and believe it is a day off where I can watch a DVD or read a book.  Why?  Because typing all day all by myself is boring.  Sure, I love the research I do for writing projects.  But staying home while all my friends are at their day jobs puts me in a place where I must entertain myself.  And frankly, I can be a pretty boring person.

So freelance writing isn’t all fun and games.  It requires a heap of self motivation and the ability to keep oneself solitarily occupied.  I’m still learning.  I’ve worked in a business office for over 13 years so the last six months at home have been an interesting challenge.  But is it worth it to be home sometimes 24 hours a day?  You bet!  I wouldn’t change a thing.  It can only get better with experience.

Is anyone else working this extended holiday weekend?  Is it only me?  “Why, Coffeeshop Pop,” you may ask, “are you working during this celebratory time when there should be only time spent gorging on barbeque picnics and enjoying the B-E-A-Utiful weather with your darling kids?”

Well, as is typical with the great Pacific Northwest it is cloudy and threatening to rain.  Even if I attempted a cookout on the grill and successfully avoided the rain, my 1st grader is a self-emposed vegetarian and wouldn’t eat my nummy smoked Kielbasa anyway.

In addition, I have two deadlines to meet this coming week so I must put the fingers to the keyboard in order to complete a couple of freelance projects.  While my kids are with me this weekend it does challenge me to find time and space to get the work done.  The young-uns do demand a lot of my attention but they also like to be entertained by the collection of DVD’s by the TV.  So while uncle Disney plays his feature films I sit at my comfy recliner with my laptop and type away, slowly edging closer to the finish of my projects.

So what are YOU doing on your holiday?