My Commute

This blog entry is part of a short series dealing with my gripes. You can read the introduction here, along with the first gripe, which explains why I live where I do.

My commute and the traffic is almost always slow. Rarely is my drive "straight home" any less than 45 minutes. If there is an accident along the way, it will easily be over and hour. The going-to-work commute is usually shorter. But I don't mind the commute itself. Really. It is my alone time for the day. (My wife also knew from the start that I am a person who enjoyed my alone time, and she enjoyed hers.) I can think without interruption, I can listen to what I want to listen to, without considering what my wife would like to hear, or what I don't want my children to hear. For example, my diverse taste in music includes harder classic rock, whereas my wife isn't fond of that style.

The problem comes in that when I combine my long working day with this long commute. I always have a long working day because I have a short workweek. Sometimes, I need to work later than "normal", which makes the working day even longer.

This means that when I do get home from work, there isn't a lot of time to spend with the wife and kids or do anything else before I should be getting to bed. This means I almost never get a full night's rest during my workweek, and often it becomes more like an extended nap.

Hey, no problem, right? I have a short workweek, so I've got plenty of time for the wife and kids and relaxation on my days off, right? Well, sometimes. Usually my wife saves the errands for my days off, so that I can do them while she is watching the kids at home, or vice versa, or so that we can do them as a family. So my days off are often filled with running errands I thought my wife would be handling when we married as well as the typical honey-dos that any husband should expect.

If my commute was shorter, perhaps I'd have more time to spend with my family, more time to spend with the guys (that's practically nonexistent right now, as it has been for most of the marriage), or more time alone with more freedom to do what I want during my alone time instead of being limited to "thinking" or listening to talk radio/music as I try to avoid getting hit by other drivers.

Perhaps I will find employment closer to home. It's highly unlikely my current employer will be moving any closer to our house.

These days, I get home and try to get my "older" kid out to the local park for fun and exercise, and I can right now, but as the days grow shorter that won't be the case.

So why doesn't my wife do that earlier in the day? Well, it has to do with the same reason she didn't want a house with any stairs, and why she saves most of the errands for my days off.

I'll get into that in my next installment.

(Writing out these gripes reveals that I have very little to gripe about in the overall scheme of things. I have a job, I have a working vechicle, and most importantly I have a great wife and children. Still, I want to make things better, if I can.)