A Day Off

I finally had a day off on Sunday. Everything that absolutely had to be done was done. It's been almost three weeks since I had more than an hour or two to call my own. I slept in till a little after 9:00. What an incredible pleasure. Lana was up before me, which is somewhat unusual, and not long after I got up she was in the mood for breakfast and made bacon and eggs and toast while I set up the table and chairs on the deck.

We also hadn't seen the sun much for the past week, but it was out Sunday and the yard was drying up after a week of rain. The temperature was perfect. We ate leisurely and watched the birds making their own breakfast at our feeders--Cardinals, Blue Jays, Doves, Chipping Sparrows, Goldfinches, Brown Thrashers, Red-winged Blackbirds, Wrens, Chickadees, Titmice. The only negative was that there were still too many human sounds in the neighborhood. Cars going by, an AC running, and a party on the next street over with many screaming children. I didn't let that bother me too much.

Later I played around on the computer but the electricity went out. If I'd had work to do I would have been angry and frustrated, but without any immediate demands on my time I, instead, had a nice nap. After that I had a walk around the neighborhood. I thought about writing, but in the end I didn't do any. I just couldn't bear the thought of anything that seemed like work. I read instead and played a little bit of a video game when the electricity came back on. I did help Lana wash the dishes, which was the closest I came to work all day.

We had some leftover spaghetti and Lana put some shrimp and Alfredo sauce with it for supper. We ate on the deck again and it was much quieter. I could hear frogs instead of human noises. It was growing pretty dark by then and most of the birds that came to the feeders were Cardinals. There were probably at least thirty of them, although they moved about so much it was hard to count.

Finally, a little reading and then we watched The Walking Dead. By 10:20 I was in bed, not looking forward to the heavy week ahead. I get another set of papers in my writing class today (Monday) so I will be grading a lot in the next few days. A big surge in committee work is coming up too. Maybe the thought of next Sunday will keep me going. I hope so.

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Wednesday Bliss

You gotta love a day like today. Although I have one more test to give and grade tomorrow, I finished the grading for my other tests last night and was able to turn in the grades early this morning. That gave me the rest of the day off. And it's amazing how much you can get done with a day off.

After visiting some blogs and handling some of the business elements of writing, I headed out to a new Sushi place that just opened up. This was "Kazoku Sushi" and I will definitely be visiting again. The white tuna wasn't terribly good, but the pepper tuna and California roll were exquisite. It turned out that the waitress remembered me from when she used to work at a different sushi restaurant so I also got very good service. (Hey, being a man with long hair sometimes works in your favor.)

After lunch, I returned home and folded a couple of loads of clothes, then had a most excellent two hour nap. By 3:45, I was ensconced upon my deck with the laptop at hand working on the galleys for a book called Bitter Steel, which I've mentioned here before and which I hope will be published some time this year. It's a collection of my fantasy short stories. It was a beautiful sunny day, about 70 degrees, with lots of birds flitting among the feeders in our yard. I worked pretty much straight through until about 6:45, making very good progress, and am now taking my supper break.

Who knows what I'll do next. Read? Watch a movie? Write some more? That's the beauty of a day off. Time to relax and time to write. Man, I could get used to this kind of schedule.
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