My wife's in her final year of residency, so I know what you mean. I work from home in part to be around when she's off, but the demands of the lifestyle are especially clear when you see neighbors pulling into driveways at 5:30pm, friends enjoying a full weekend, vacations, and having several days off around the holidays.
Residency, by not granting you those things that people normally take for granted, helps you appreciate them!
I'm in the exact same boat. I work remotely and even though I've had a few job offers, one last night actually, I feel it's more important to have my flexibility here so I can see my wife when she's home. I find it especially helpful when she's on night shifts when her at-home time is <8 hours; I can move my day around hers to make meals and help wake her with coffee.
That's a very small part of it. I just hate the new look in some places, like the color-changing Safari toolbar, and it's just useless and annoying to me. Maybe 'completely unusable' was a bit of an exaggeration…YMMV.
Those early experiments claiming that plants can clean indoor air had significant methodological problems, and the results have not been reproducible in realistic building environments:
Does anyone know what is special about the pollutants addressed by these plants? Are there other pollutants that are helpful to filter, and why did NASA focus on this set?
Not entirely sure, but a lot of these VOCs come from stuff in your house (carpet, paint, plastics).
When I lived in Augusta, GA the air around the city would occasionally reek due to a nearby paper mill. The smell would blow over the city after an hour, but anything that slipped into drafty homes would remain for hours; I'd only notice after returning from walking the dogs.
I started to wonder what I was breathing and found a list of possibile offenders: formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, benzene, chloroform, tetrachloroethylene, and trichloroethylene [1]
I was hoping my plants would help (the link nate_meurer posted casts some doubt).
I remember a few of us developers resisting a push for 10-12 hours days at a company I worked at. It was easy to find precedent in research and blog posts about how it wasn't sustainable.
It's been interesting to see what my wife experiences as a medical resident lately, in contrast to what I'm used to in the software world: 10-16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and it's incredibly normal, necessary, unquestioned. Today's residents have it easier with the lower 80-hour restrictions in place. When there's talk about the workload, it tends to center around how the lower limits might actually be bad (eg, this recent New Yorker piece http://nyr.kr/15hELxF).
Residency, by not granting you those things that people normally take for granted, helps you appreciate them!