Wednesday, July 16, 2025

This is the seventieth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Please take a moment to pray for the victims of the recent Texas floods, and for all those affected by natural disasters recently.

Another major point brought up several times in On Good Soil is how homesteading brings the father of the family back from the factory or office that he works in to be more integrated with the rest of the family on a daily basis. This is something that we have been able to do for several years now, with my working from home.

I work for a software company that was originally based in Idaho, before being bought up by another company, which then got bought by a larger company, so technically I work for a global company now. But my primary office was and still is in Boise, and that’s what I put down on applications as my employer address. I commuted in to work every day, usually only a half an hour each way, not too bad.

Then COVID happened, and like a Marvel movie, half of the people in the office were sent home to work there, and I was one of those chosen. I’d already been working from home a little off and on when sick or when I needed to skip the commute for the day, so this wasn’t much of a hassle. Our house had a bonus room, so I just holed up in there for the day. A few months later, they eliminated the other half of the employees, so the building was empty for a while.

Having no commute meant I could spend more time on the garden that we had just decided to implement, and it helped with the kid’s homeschooling that we had started just before COVID hit, totally coincidentally. After a while we got big ideas and I asked my employer if I could work from home somewhere else, which then led to our cross-country journey.

But having me around the house all day wasn’t strange for my family, since I’d been doing it since the kids were little. When my daughter was born, I was working for an answering service, which handled phone calls for businesses so they didn’t have to. Many people in Idaho didn’t know what that was, since it’s more common on the East Coast apparently, and many people don’t know about it now since it’s much less common at all with the advent of AI phone agents.

But anyway, my kids’ first memories of me working were in the bedroom, on the phone, while they had to be as quiet as possible. It made for an odd sort of game during college breaks when I worked full time, less so when I only worked at night. It was actually strange for them when I had to leave the house for a job, rather than when I had to stay home for one. And now, they’re the ones who will be leaving for school as we transition into this new Season of life. Strange how these things happen, isn’t it?