Tag Archives: weekend

The lost day…

Posted on by

Today kind of feels like the day that wasn’t. Between getting a latter than usual start, the usual Saturday errands, cutting the grass and a laundry list of other minutia around the house I sat down a few minutes ago and realized it was almost 8:30 and I hadn’t gotten a blog post in for the day. In fairness, that might be mostly because there wasn’t a thing that happened today that was worth mentioning. As much as I would like to opine about the current fiasco in Syria again all that really makes me want to do is throw my hands up, quit civilization, and go find a couple of hundred acres of the mountain west to call my own, build an off the grid cabin and the proceed to ignore the rest of the world as much as possible. I don’t know how you go from being the world’s only superpower to begging the French for help in less than a generation, but it seems like we’ve managed to pull it off. Of course that’s not the point of this post.

Then again, this post doesn’t really have a point that I’ve been able to identity other than the fact that it’s slowly creeping towards 9PM and I can’t really give you an accounting of where they day went. Fortunately there are two days left this weekend. Hopefully I can manage not to lose them too.

What I Did on My Furlough Friday (Part 6 of 6)…

Posted on by

I feel like we’ve reached the end of an era together. Now that I’m sitting here writing at the tail end of Furlough 2013, I’d love to say I’m sorry to see it go… but in the perpetual war between free time and spending money, money has won out yet again. It’s just as well that next week will bring back the standard 5-day work week. Another five of six weeks of being a part time worker would have probably ruined me completely for ever having a full time job again. If you haven’t had the experience in your adult life, a 4-on, 3-off schedule is pretty damned easy to get use to.

Being philosophical doesn’t really tell you much about how I used my final scheduled off-Friday for the immediate future. The answer to that one is simple: I did all the stuff I would have otherwise done on Saturday – grocery shopping, banking, stopping by the post office, and enjoying a late lunch at Chiplote just to top off the day. Now I’m back home writing, editing, and trying to remember that English is my first language and I should really know how to use it. All things considered, it’s been a successful Furlough Friday… I just hope it’ the last time I have to use those two words together in a sentence. Somehow I can’t shake the feeling that it’s just an operational pause before we reach a whole new level of stupid when the new year kicks off on October 1st.

Be sure to tune in here tomorrow for “My Trip to Walmart…”, a Post By Request coming to you whenever I get around to turning it in to actual sentences based on the notes I took while shopping for groceries this afternoon. With a plug like that, how can you not want to come back and check it out?

What I Did on My Furlough Friday (Part 5 of 6)…

Posted on by

You can see from the title that word came down from echelons higher than reality that the Great Defense Furlough of 2013 has been shortened from eleven days to six. That’s outstanding. I’m all for it. I’ll be glad to get back to not having 20% of my pay chopped off every other Thursday.

All other things considered, Furlough Friday has gone pretty much how you might have expected. There was grocery shopping and playing with the dogs. Before the day is over there might even be a little laundry. What there hasn’t been, of course, is anything that would have required any more funds than was absolutely necessary. The grand irony of furlough is that you have plenty of time off, but the pay reduction makes you want to squeeze every quarter until George screams for mercy. Fortunately beer is still pretty cheap and no one is charging admission to sit on the deck, so it hasn’t been too much of a sacrifice yet.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go now and do absolutely nothing. It’s my furlough day after all and working is against the rules. With the end in sight, at least now I can kick back and attempt to enjoy the rest of the day. Someday soon I’ll once again spend Fridays fiddling with PowerPoint, but today’s not that day.

What you get…

Posted on by

What you get when you’ve got a guy who’s a little too attached to his routine and an extra day off every week is a list of things that usually takes until mid-day Sunday to accomplish being done before noon on Saturday. That’s not the worst problem to have, of course, but it does point towards needing to revise the weekly to do list to account for an additional 24 hours of non-scheduled time. I told myself I’d get down to the business of outlining a few potential ideas for a new book, but from this post you can imagine for yourself how that’s going so far.

So yeah, here we are on Saturday afternoon with absolutely nothing pressing to get into. I’m flipping through my three-ring binder of comfort food recipes trying to light onto something that sounds good for dinner tonight. As for the rest, it looks like maybe I’ll get some reading done and get some quality time with the kids… or maybe I can get started on building the bigger tortoise habitat that I sketched out a few months ago. Seriously, having this much regular free time on on hands is freaking me out a little.

What I did on my Furlough Friday…

Posted on by

I really should just be staying home, conserving resources, and bitching online about the monumental contempt in which I hold the elected “leaders” of this country, but instead I cooked an actual breakfast this morning and knocked around with the dogs. Washed some clothes, did some dishes, and made myself presentable. I trolled around a few of the local pawn shops looking for deals on a couple of specific items and found out that grocery shopping at 1PM on a Friday is every bit as good as 8AM on Sunday. I’ll be keeping that little secret in mind for the next nine weeks. I cut the grass and decided even I’m not obsessive enough to do an hour’s worth of trimming in 100 degree heat. No worries, this weekend still has two more days and I’m sure obsession will trump heat at some point.

So now that everyone else has started their weekend too, here I sit, nursing a Red Stripe, trying hard to coax a few hundred words onto the page. If I’m bluntly honest with everyone, the beer is disappearing far faster than the words are showing up, so there probably won’t be much to salvage by the time it wraps up this evening. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that. Fortunately, the words always seem to show up eventually, even when I don’t know exactly where they’re coming from. However it happens, I’ll take them all.

So yeah, Furlough Friday #2 (or Saturday Part 1 if you prefer) was as much of a success as one can reasonably expect under the circumstances. It’s still new and different. Ask me a month from now and you’ll likely hear a different opinion.

Focus…

Posted on by

I’ve been having one of those days where it has been impossible to focus on anything for more than a minute or two at a clip. I wish I could blame it on some kind of external distraction, but I can’t. It’s all my own brain jumping from one thing to the next without any apparent rhyme or reason. It’s bad enough sitting here at the kitchen table trying to get through a blog post. It was downright crippling sitting at my desk trying to exercise my renowned skills as a tab-wearing PowerPoint Ranger.

Everyone’s entitled to an “off” day now and then, but when you make your living with your brain instead of your hands, it’s a little disconcerting when you never quite manage to get things into focus. I’ve had days like this before and I’m sure I’ll have them again, but at the moment all I’m hoping to do is make it through New Friday to Saturday (Part 1) and see if maybe a weekend can get my head straightened out.

Furlough Friday: Take 1…

Posted on by

And so, the first Furlough Friday of FY13 draws slowly to a close. Some of you might be wondering how it went. Although I didn’t have a to do list for the day, here are some of the highlights:

– Wake up, roll over, and tell the alarm clock to go fuck itself

– Brew and drink at least a pot of coffee

– Send hostile and antagonistic message to local members of Congress

– Write at least 500 words before leaving the house

– Pick up groceries

– Watch four episodes of The Sopranos

– Attempt to write a creative and snarky blog post (mostly unsuccessfully)

– Eat dinner

– Find something on TV that doesn’t make me want to pummel myself into unconsciousness

– Go to bed, wake up, and repeat weekly as required.

As much as I would like to say that Furlough Friday was a endless field of excitement, alas it was not. The good news is that despite the furlough the electricity remains on, the fridge is still cold, and inside it is enough tasty hops flavored beverage to see me through to another Furlough Friday.

Woops…

Posted on by

So in my rush to get through everything on my to do list, I neglected the fact that there are still two more days available in this weekend. Since I’m not the type to just make up things to do, it seems I’ll have more free time than I was estimating. The down side, of course, is that I was expecting a new episode of TrueBlood tonight… But since I’ve got a good book and plenty of ice cold Red Stripe, every little thing is gonna be alright.

Small pleasures…

Posted on by

One of life’s small pleasures is the feeling you get blowing through the office doors at 4:01 PM on the day leading into an extra-long weekend. It’s a happy moment knowing you’re as far away from your desk as you’re going to get… but being a glass half empty kind of guy, I also have to readily acknowledge that every minute that ticks past after 4:01 is one minute closer to the inevitable let down of being back at my desk when our revels have ended. Happily that’s more a Sunday kind of problem.

To a casual reader I think it must seem like I hate my job. It only seems that way. The work actually tends towards interesting and most of the people fall somewhere along the spectrum of better than average. There are, of course, exceptions but that’s to be expected everywhere as far as I can tell. Like everyone else, the simple fact is there are just other things I’d rather be doing than sitting in a box hammering away at PowerPoint for those eight hours in the middle of the day. For some reason, I don’t think I’d mind working the keys quite so much if I were doing my own writing for those same eight hours. Being a self-published eBook author, though, doesn’t pay the bills. Maybe someday.

This isn’t really a post about work, though. It’s a post about embracing the joy of the time off we do have – about making the most of the time we don’t spend sitting in a box. Whether you’re writing, grilling, boating, swimming, shopping, or just sitting around on your ass not doing a thing, try to enjoy it. The small pleasures are way too few and far between.

All go, all day…

Posted on by

The problem with running all day like a house on fire is that you reach a point round about 5PM when all you want to do is sit down and sleep. That’s all well and good, but there’s also that little obnoxious voice in your head reminding you that there are still things that need done… like writing a witty and entertaining blog post on Saturday night. Yeah, I’m honestly not sure this post is going to be either witty or entertaining. I’m not really complaining. I really did get alot done today and since this has been my first weekend home in the last three, I feel good about that. Still, I’d rather not have looked up and realized it was going on 8PM. Maybe I should have cut off the productivity a little earlier. Of course then I’d be sitting here obsessing about the list of things that didn’t get done today. It’s a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Just one of life’s little hardships.

I’m not going to lie, I’m looking forward to a much abbreviated to do list for tomorrow. Beyond blogging and taking on a few other odds and ends, my only hope is that it’s a good day to get a little more writing done. Sitting down with a good book for an hour or two would just put the day over the top. I’m trying to manage my expectations.