Touch Too Much

ten more pounds until he reaches adult size. To reach the dog run at the back of the property, we go through the sunroom. In addition to serving as the exit to the back yard, the sunroom is also the dog area where Echo’s bed, blanket, toys, and food and water bowls are kept. The doggie door that leads to the half-acre enclosed dog run is securely locked to prevent Echo from running back and forth between the inside of the house and the outside dog run. One-third of the dog run is sand for digging and laying on, especially in warmer weather. The other two-thirds is tall fescue grass that is drought tolerant of Albuquerque’s semi-arid environment. The original plan was when the weather warms, I’ll close the door between the sunroom and the rest of the house and let Echo ping-pong between the sunroom and the dog run. He’ll be old enough to keep himself company by then. Also, in that time, Kyle will help me build an obstacle course for Echo to help with his energy as he’s a Border collie and is very task-oriented.

Now, along with helping me with Echo, Kyle Ngo is also helping me with my new puppy. Maddie found her a few weeks ago, and Kyle, a fauna PsySapient, is taking care of her until she is ready to live with me. Maddie, a flora PsySapient, was visiting a farm in Mississippi that was experiencing a pervasive plant species trying to take over their fields. Maddie found an abandoned female German Shepherd mix and brought her back to SWACon after I agreed to take her. I named her Shotzie and she has been dewormed, cleaned, healed, feed until her weight has reached near normal, and she was just spayed. She’s only a month older than Echo but is still a puppy like him as German Shepherds take longer to grow to adulthood.

Echo and I’ve been visiting her daily as Kyle takes care of her. Barring any complications, Shotzie will be cleared to come home with us in the next couple of days. With her around, they’ll keep each other company and I’ll let them go back and forth from the sunroom to the dog run earlier than anticipated.

We return to the house and I enter my home office. My house is a two-story, three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath adobe home that sits in the middle of five acres. I bought the land and had the house built almost eight years ago after becoming a self-employed virtual assistant. The house is a bit large for just me, but I wanted to have room when my parents and siblings visited. My parents only visited a couple of times before their deaths, but my siblings have been here over a dozen times. In addition to easily encompassing the house and the large outside dog run, I also bought the land for the remoteness.

The kitchen is large enough for a round kitchen table in the far corner area. The house also has a rarely used dining room, a living room, a sunroom off the back mainly for Echo and now Shotzie, and an open floor room upstairs with a half-bath. The open upstairs room was used as a fourth bedroom. My plan was for anyone to choose the room they wanted, with my parents getting first dibs and then my brother and sister battling it out. My parents died in a car accident almost four years ago and my siblings now only stay in the two guest bedrooms downstairs.

For years, I just plopped my laptop on the dining room table the rare times that I worked from home, usually only when I was sick, so a permanent setup wasn’t needed. I’m now revising this practice. I left the upstairs space alone for the past four years, but I finally decided to convert it to a proper home office a couple months ago. Right now, I have temporary office furniture, just a couple assembly required office pieces. But I’ve decided to permanently work from home, thus freeing up my agency office space to be used by my employees.

I own Gray’s Agency which offers virtual assistance services, and I employ four virtual assistants and an office manager. Two months ago, I turned over all my regular clients to my employees, keeping only my three municipal clients, two of which are very time consuming. One is Sheriff Helki with the Psycept Police Division. Another is Director Lowell, the head of the Psycept Civilian Support Services or PCSS. My third client is the Auraria Psycept Police, but they have a manageable workload for me. I like working on the special projects these clients bring me plus municipal contracts tend to pay well. With my client workload now being Psycept focused, the three weekly Psycept consultations I perform as required by my residency contract, plus co-founding a group devoted to Psycept concerns, and now being a member of the Psycept Council, I feel I’m not contributing much to the agency workload and payroll. But as the owner, I take up the largest space with my own office. Dani, our office manager, has been spectacularly successful in recruiting new business and my four virtual assistants are barely treading water.

So, I’ll gracefully leave the office building that I own and move my higher-end office furniture here. The extra space means two new assistants can be hired bringing the total to six.  The senior assistants, Rhea Morningsong and Soon Yee Ngo, can decide how they want the space allocated. They can either share my office leaving their two smaller offices to be split between the four assistants, or the four assistants can inhabit my old office allowing Soon Yee and Rhea to each have their own office. Soon Yee will soon take her Spring Festival vacation with Kyle, her husband, and their daughter, which provides a perfect opportunity to revamp the office space.

My reluctance to work from home before now was for fear of becoming a hermit and