If you’re trying to find the right work-life balance, consider an archeology dig at home instead of gas guzzling trip. You could make a game of it with the kids, and award a prize for the oldest artifact they discover in categories like family history, written material, and even food. And no, we don’t mean you should go dig up your yard.

Maybe it’s just a reflection on us, but we discovered some ancient relics in our kitchen, and we know there must be some buried in our bedroom too.

As low fat, low calorie types, in general, we stay away from things like peanut butter and jelly. But there are times when a bagel or Ritz cracker with peanut butter is the perfect quick lunch or snack.

One of the nice things about working from home is that lunchtime can be whenever you decide it’s time. So after rolling into the office this morning at 5am, our stomachs told us it was time for lunch about 10:30—that’s equivalent to 2:30 if you’re a nine-to-five’er.

So we thawed some bagels in the microwave, toasted them in counter-top oven, cut them and slathered creamy peanut butter on each half. Jelly was next, and like stumbling on dinosaur bones in a glacier, we found a jar of apricot-pineapple jelly in the fridge door. Apricot-pineapple? We hadn’t had any for years.

Sure enough. The ’sell-by’ date was 2001. And there wasn’t even a microbilogy experiment growing inside.

But we did even better in the pantry. Looking for ingredients for dinner we spied an unfamiliar can of yams. With the recent jelly discovery in mind we looked at the imprint on the can. 1998!

Yeah, okay, not exactly from Pliocene Era or even the same importance as the International Monetary Fund review of the U.S. financial system that was announced recently. And this advice won’t save the planet. But, hey, working at home is all about work life balance, isn’t it? And balance is where you find it.

Wonder what relics the top shelf of the bedroom is hiding? No food, we hope.

For people who can and will work at home, that may be the last resort for many as gas prices continue to climb and the economy continues to dive.

Yesterday the Conference Board reported that consumer confidence had fallen to its lowest level since 1992, as high energy prices and a worsening job market begin changing attitudes toward discretionary spending.

There are also indicators that more people are falling behind on credit card payments, even as the number of mortgages in some stage of foreclosure reach record levels.

For example, in April, credit card performance fell in four of five measures according to Moody’s Credit Card Credit Indiceswho tracks over $445 billion of United States bank credit card loans. Worse, the charge-off rate, which measures credit-card account balances written off as uncollectable as an annualised percent of total loans outstanding, rose to 6.27 percent, up 31 percent from the rate a year earlier, which was 4.77 percent. The rise in April marks the sixteenth consecutive month of year-on-year increase and the seventh consecutive month of month-on-month increase, Moody’s said.

Moody’s said the April delinquency rate, which measures the proportion of account balances for which a monthly payment is more than 30 days late as a percent of total balances, rose to 4.50 percent from 3.70 percent a year earlier. They  also reported that in April cardholders paid back, on average, 17.49 percent of their credit card debt, about 6.10 percent less than they did a year earlier when they paid back 18.63 percent.

Had some fun with a cool little tool over at wordle.net that makes word clouds. The more frequently a word occurs in text the bigger the word in the results.

I copied the text of all the posts here and pasted it into Wordle and ta-rah:

A science blogger stuffed the ballot box with words in proporation to the size of planets and got this:

And a life long friend took Obama’s Pressidental announcemnt and made this:

Bravo highlights importance of wireless telecoms to lower … AME Info, United Arab Emirates - Jun 23, 2008 … and health care services electronically as well as encouraging the telecommuting within the economical development that the Kingdom is experiencing now. …

Employers Consider Ways To Cut Commutes Hartford Courant, United States - Jun 23, 2008 Telecommuting has gained traction year by year with advances in video conferencing, instant messaging and other communications technologies. …

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