6:30 is the new 7:00.
I used to gripe about Steve’s work hours a lot more. Every few weeks, I would rant about it on the blog. I haven’t done it in a while. He acquired a new boss a couple of years ago (his old one was escorted to the door by security) and things have been much better. Sure, he leaves the house at 6:50 am and gets home at 7:00 PM, but that’s good by Wall Street standards. Before there were much later nights and forced after work drinking hours.
So, for the past couple of years, he has been coming home dependably at 7:00. There was a pass off of the kids and I would go to the computer. It wasn’t perfect. He wouldn’t eat until 9:00 and we didn’t have much time to chat, but it was better than before.
Yes, the economic downturn is very bad for America. People are getting laid off. We may never see universal health care. There will be more people on welfare. Yes, those are very bad things.
But it also means that Steve’s coming home earlier and less stressed, because there’s much less work to do. For the past couple of months, he’s been home at 6:30. We actually eat dinner together and talk and he can help Jonah with any left over homework and chase Ian around the house. That half hour is HUGE.
Combine that with the kids getting older and easier and me working a lot less and we’re like almost sane. It’s strange and my system isn’t quite used to it. We had a blank schedule today and I still filled it up – a family biking trip, a proper dinner, closet cleaning. There was getting-Jonah-to-like-fiction hour, which involves me reading Harry Potter with arm waving and English accents (it’s working). There was much chasing of Ian, who is really a giggling puppy who wants to play Hide and Go Seek non-stop. It is tiring, but his laugh is so infectious that we can’t help tickling him all day long.
Steve called me last week to say that he had a conference call and that he would be coming home on the 7:00 bus or "regular time." I told him that 7:00 was no longer "regular time." It is now officially late.
Apt. 11d 
There is a great old joke about the lawyer in a small town in North Dakota and he was starving. But then another lawyer moved to town and soon they were both prosperous.
Volcker – what a smart guy he is! – noted that we had been spending 1-2% of GDP since forever maintaining the financial sector, and recently it has been as high as 4%, and he thought that wasn’t very good. And I’ve been thinking it surely isn’t good news that half the graduating class from Yale and Princeton and Penn and Dartmouth has been going off to Wall Street.
There is surely an optimal size and level of effort from the financial sector, in allocating new investment and disinvesting from buggy whip factories. If even with the carnage we have seen, your husband’s firm doesn’t have huge amounts to do, that seems like evidence we should try and keep our spending on the financial sector closer to historic ranges.
Can I also hope that we can shift our new-housing construction towards units where the number of residents is equal to or exceeds the number of bathrooms?
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