All we lawyers have worked from home plenty of times.  Whether it was Tuesday afternoon and we were waiting for the plumber to come over, or it was [the middle of the night/the weekend/your kid’s birthday/Christmas].  My current practice as a contract attorney selling my time and services to other attorneys in the States while I live in Rome necessitates my working from home all the time.

It’s not terribly glamorous – I came here because to increase the glamour in the parts of my life that bookend work.  I get up, dress in extremely casual clothing, make coffee, sit down, and start to work on whatever project I’ve got going on.  In the days I’m not busy, I work on this site, my other site, social media, and anything I can think of to get more work.  My home office is just as equipped as my home office in Dallas was, so my clients can expect the thing out of my as my former partners did.

Funny, I feel less distracted than before.  I have a television, with English channels, and I have not turned it on once since I have been in this apartment.  I would not even know how to turn it on.  I have no garden to attend to, and strangely my former mountains of laundry are, here, anthills.  I do not have endless choices of snacks in the kitchen calling my name.  My activities on this site and social media take place only when I do not have an assignment pending.  This explains my periods of inactivity followed by ferocious bursts of blogging and posting.

Two things are different: the background noise and the view.

The background noise comes in my (still open in mid-October) windows.  Because I live next to a post-card perfect pedestrian street by St. Peter’s Basilica, lined with sidewalk cafes and roving musicians, the sounds through the windows include the clink of porcelain espresso cups on porcelain dishes; accordions playing O Sole Mio and Arrivederci Roma; Italian and American voices discussing, usually, food; the rumble of cars one street away and the BRRRRM of scooters just yards away.  None of it is distracting and, actually, if it weren’t there I would probably be more easily distracted by things like television and Facebook.   I’m at once inside and outside, alone and with people, immersed in American law and Italian life.

The other thing that is different is my view.  My former law firm was probably about as good as it gets in terms of… everything.  But I do remember wishing that I were looking at something beautiful out the window while I poured over cases, and not a parking lot.  I have gotten my wish.

In two weeks I am moving…again…to the top-floor apartment in the same building.  My view should be even better.  Until this, this is nice.