Best Laid Plans

Months ago I made the decision to take the week of Memorial Day off from teaching. If I don’t purposely block time out it will get filled with classes. I know that I need some blocks of time at home to actually get somethings done and just see friends at home.

Little did I know when I blocked this week off I would have a friend having an operation. Someone was looking out for me that I was free when needed. I was happy to help out with that rather than doing the things I thought I would be doing this week.

I did get to have some fun this week. Celebrating Christy’s birthday yesterday was top on the list, and getting to play some Mah Jongg. We had dinner out with friends tonight and are going out to lunch tomorrow with some other friends.

Tomorrow night another couple is coming to our house for dinner. So, that is a lot of fun for my week off.

Sadly, I did not go to the attic. It’s an ongoing joke that I will never clean anything out from the attic. Right now I think all the light bulbs are burned out so I can’t even go up in the night and get a box to look through. I will have to save this job for another time I take a week off.

I did work in the garden this morning and watered plants around the property. Things are looking good enough and we are eating arugula as fast as we can.

Russ cleaned out the overflow pantry in the garage for me. I asked what I need to use up and it looks like we should be having tuna melts for a month.

I did actually do one major job I should have done in March, cleaning the outdoor glass topped table. We bought this aluminum table and chairs for our terrace before Carter was born. It has served us well and is still going strong. The only issue is the channel on the table where the glass top fits in gets full of junk from pine needles falling on it, and other natural shmutz growing under the glass.

It is a big job to clean it out, because I have to lift the glass up and prop it a few inches from it’s normal place and scrub the aluminum and the glass. It is one of those jobs I have to do every spring, but sometimes it doesn’t get done until summer. I feel so accomplished that I have it done and can consider my week off successful despite the lack of other progress. The bathroom mirrored wall that goes up to the ceiling needs to be cleaned, but since that has been a few years, what is another few months?

I have too many people patiently waiting to learn Mah Jongg. Who cares if the mirror in my bath room needs to be cleaned up by the ceiling. I can’t take another week off until it’s time to go to Maine. No cleaning then. Hopefully no more people need any operations. If I don’t schedule time off they just can’t happen.