The long holiday weekend. If you're
traveling and spending it with family, then yes, you can use up the
days quickly. This year I didn't go out of town and spent a minimal
amount of time at Thanksgiving dinner, so man, this has been a long
weekend! Usually I can easily fill up extra time with movies,
audiobooks, and podcasts, but people, I am media-ed out! Okay, only
after listening to NPR's Splendid Table Turkey Confidential,
and then after watching Nova Science Now's Can I Eat That? (I know about food molecules and stuff now.) And
then I finished a Horatio Hornblower movie I had started the
night before. But then I was really done for real. I went for a
lovely walk before dinner, but after that, I had to be home. I didn't
know what to do, but I have a lot of to do's, as most home-owners can
imagine.
By Friday I was almost glad to busy
myself with tasks I had procrastinated on for weeks or even months. I
finally vacuumed my car after thinking about it for much of this
autumn. I even carefully wiped down the interior. Dang, my car
hasn't been this clean in...six months? A year? Later at home, I
looked at my kitchen and realized I'd rather clean out my fridge than
watch yet another hour of Netflix. Only media saturation could compel
me to choose this task, but the fridge needed a serious cleaning, not
the routine one. I even washed three shelves. I spent some time
looking for my fridge's mysterious drip pan. I've read you're
supposed to clean it, but I can't find it anywhere. Funnily enough,
my mother has never heard of drip pans, so I couldn't get help by
phone. Maybe yet another year will go by with a dirty drip pan—if
it exists. I did get down on the floor and dust off some of the
refrigerator's coils—supposedly you can save a lot of power by
cleaning them off. See? This is stuff I would never do during regular
life.
I then shined my sink a la Fly Lady
and did the dish drainer mat. Is this super interesting to read?
Probably not. But I do find it noteworthy that I can reach my quota
of distraction by media. At some point I will choose to do such
tasks. Today? I already mailed two low-priority items I had been
meaning to send out for at least two months—an Amazon return and
some old family photos. Apparently a bit of boredom or ennui can get
your home cleaner. And it feels good to cross those items off my
list! Who knows when I would have gotten to them without a surplus of
free time. Maybe turning off the TV and backing away from the
Internet can create this free time, but the lazy holiday of
Thanksgiving seems to be just what I needed to get things done. All
of this should be balanced by some fun, so I hope to get more of that done
this weekend too.
