Why it is (almost) impossible to work at home, if home is here, and a farm

It is 9:16 in the morning, CSB has gone to work, I am drinking tea and working at my computer on a new story about two people on an airplane, and funerals. Although I should be finishing the horseshoe crab novel, at least I am working on something, and the day seems to be progressing properly.

“Honey, can you open the door for me?” It is Jorge the painter, and he is standing outside my office window. (First thought: at least I am not in pajamas, because the possibility of wearing pajamas well best midday is one of the dubious perks of working at home.) I don’t like it when Jorge calls me Honey and I am also annoyed with him because he comes and paints for half a day, then disappears for two weeks to South Carolina (once) and other places, unknown, and so the job (painting the western side of the house, theoretically a week-long job) has been unfinished for a long time, weeks, many weeks, and that is the sort of thing that can make an already slightly OCD person get worse. Plus, he started calling me Honey when he started the job and I didn’t bother to correct him at that time (which would have been the correct time) by saying something like: “I am not your Honey. Honey is a product of the Bees. Only one person gets to call me Honey.” But I was too lazy or polite to set the record straight at the proper time, and now it seems that it would capricious and nasty to do so. But the truth is, every time he calls me Honey it grates on my nerves a little bit more, because now I have only myself to blame.
So I go & open the guest room door (because Jorge needs to get inside and open certain windows that need painting, painting that should have been finished weeks ago), and then I realize that the guest room is quite untidy, and since CSB’s son, Colby (just in from Nicaragua) and a girl who may or may not be his girlfriend are staying there tonight, I feel compelled to tidy the room a bit. This involves moving stacks of Bee Culture into a cabinet, and also moving stacks of Fine Woodworking into the same cabinet. And moving the collapsible beach chairs out of the guest room and into the shed. And gathering up random items such as drill bits, beehive mouse guards, tape measures and loose change.
Then I note that with all the boxes of honey jars are stacked up in the hallway, and it will be challenging to vacuum up all the dust bunnies and dead bugs that are guaranteed to be lurking there. So I move all the honey jar boxes into the basement hearth room – where they more or less belong, assuming they belong anywhere. Except for the 12 boxes of small jars that we bring upstairs to the kitchen because we need to bottle this week for Charlie’s wedding.
And since I am already in the kitchen I scrape all the oven-dried tomatoes off the racks and put them in a container, and label it. And since I am there, I also put 3 eggplants in the oven to bake them, in order to make the rissoles later, because rissoles seem to be the best thing to do with vast amounts of eggplants, which we tend to have this time of year. And also, because they are quite delicious. To my immense satisfaction, I have fooled several people (two) who claimed to never eat/loathe eggplant into eating and enjoying eggplant through the medium of these rissoles. Having put them in the oven, I check to make sure I have the other ingredients for rissoles: cheese, breadcrumbs, parsley – that will have to be picked. And since I am already in the kitchen I eat the half of a melon that CSB grew and is rather ripe, because I haven’t had breakfast – I was so happily working away in my office mere minutes, or hours, ago - and then I see the compost is full again – of course it is since here are loads of squishy tomatoes in there – but I don’t go out to empty the compost and check the eggs. I come back here instead. And write about why it is impossible to efficiently work at home. No, not if you are me.
And now it is 10:27.