philosophy of creating and defining LB places

hello all,

i'm hoping for some wisdom and guidance from some of you. a cruise through the faq didn't yield what exactly what i was looking for, so i'm asking here. i have two general questions but i'll post each separately since they are different in application.

i am self-employed (book designer and photographer). i exist in a blear of work-and-personal-life all mixed together that is surely familar to many of you. i've been trying to set up places intelligently in LB and have run into some confusion, which also makes me envious of people who go off to the office from 8 to 4:30, then do a series of errands, then come home. (i'm sure they are equally envious of me.)

here's the basic scene:

1. i live and work in an old barn in new hampshire, and my son lives with me a month at a time, every other month.
2. my sweetie lives in vermont, and i try to see her as much as i can in the months when my son is at his mother's house. when i go to vermont i take my laptop and can do most any work from there.
3. my main client is in maine; i try to go there for a day every couple of weeks.
4. my mother is in a nursing home, also in maine, but not the same place as the client.

those are the *physical* places.

at the moment i have this list of places in LB:

bank
brunswick (location of nursing home)
sports center (where i swim most days)
downtown/errands
grocery store
hartland (my sweetie's town)
on the road
owen home (things that concern my son)
personal time
phone personal
phone studio
post office
saco (location of my main client)
stretch break (severfal times daily)
working time (theoretically, nh and vermont but not anywhere else)

what's confusing to me is that it all happens at once: i'm doing laundry, going to fetch my kid after school, answering the studio phone, and trying to design a book (and keep track of billabel hours) all at once. when i am at sylvia's in vermont, many of tasks i have to do in the studio are still valid, but others local to my base in new hampshire are not.

i have tried to make the places reflect states of mind as much as physical places, but the list above seems too long. (bank, sports, grocery, p.o. all show up in downtown errands, of course). but it feels like too much.

for example: should i put all business calls into "phone studio" and then have those appear in "working time" and "phone studio" and "on the road" and "saco"? because i make calls from all those locations.

if i am travelling seeing clients, or seeing my mother, i do not think of that as working time since i cannot spend undistracted hours working, yet often things come up that need attention.

i know all of you are as busy and fractured as i am, and suspect that some of you are making LB work more effectively than i have mad eit work so far. could any of you who in a similar situation of work-and-home merged talk about how you grouped things and how you attack the day? on some larger level i feel that i'm still not "getting it" in terms of the power of LB's places tool.

thanks for any help,

bruce