What To Do When You’re Stir Crazy In Your Office Again

Whenever I get anxious and find myself going crazy because of all the time I spend working at home alone, I realize that there is a solution: I get busy outside. Working at a desk and staring at a screen can make you bonkers, so I find that when I get this way, particularly after lunch, I need to clear my head.

My first stop is usually to my truck, where I gather up the recyclables and the trash and the garden clippings and head to the Deerfield dump. Well, they don’t call it a dump any more, now it’s a transfer station, where our trash is stored until they can truck it to Chicopee. God knows where it will go after they close that big landfill, I only hope that at some point the trash gets sent to a place where they sort it. There’s a whole lot of metals, valuable wood, and recyclable stuff that’s mixed in with the trash and somebody can make a whole lot of money from that.

Once I read about a guy in Connecticut who runs the facility where trash gets sorted. The one thing he said was the most prevalent in the trash was spare change. They get hundreds of dollars that people throw away!

But loading up the truck and visiting the friendly people at our town landfill usually perks me back up. Then if I’m still feeling leaden, like I did today, I grab a rake and begin cleaning my lawn. It’s an endless process, my lawn seems to wear really hard over the winters. But spending some time doing that good old aerobic exercise known as raking is my cure for the by-yourself-in-the-office blues.