Walt at Random

I was tempted to ask that question Sunday evening, as I was the previous Sunday evening, in comparing what actually got done with my list of Must, Should, and Could possibilities. The Could, of course, including some really good blog posts…

Thing is, I know where the time went on both weekends. I make the mistake of thinking that a weekend offers the equivalent of two work days entirely for my own projects, which might be true except:

• I don’t get up at 5:30 on weekends, and certainly don’t start getting my wife up at 6:30 (our weekday norm–I’m more of a morning person, and we work different schedules).
• We have leisurely hot breakfasts together on weekends, instead of my usual 20-minute weekday breakfast. (I don’t get home-cooked waffles on weekdays, and I don’t get good breakfast conversation either!)
• Saturday there’s grocery shopping (figure 90 minutes to 2 hours), which we do together. Most Sundays, I do another chunk of shopping (figure another 90 minutes).
• Weeknights, I fix my own dinner and probably spend 30-45 minutes total. Weekends, we walk 3/4 to 1.5 miles to dinner on Saturday (figure 2-2.5 hours including the walk both ways and dinner itself), and have a home-cooked dinner most Sundays (certainly more leisurely and more enjoyable).
• And of course there are chores: personal laundry, helping with household laundry, vaccuuming, dusting, mowing the lawn, fertilizing the lawn. If my wife’s trimming and weeding in the yard, I cope with getting the stuff in the yard-clippings recycling bin. (Mountain View makes it easy to recycle; the result is that the city beat California 50% waste reduction target for the last two years running.)
• Maybe I even move a little slower on weekends, taking the occasional nap, reading more for pleasure (did I mention the 2 hours to read the Sunday paper?), visiting open houses, once in a while going to the library (which I haven’t done recently enough!)…

All things considered, neither weekend was all that terrible. I wrote one major piece for the October Cites & Insights each weekend, scanned and printed (blowing up from 4×5 or 3×4 to 8×10) four of my wife’s great travel photos to brighten up my cubicle, but always left a lot more undone than I’d hoped to do.

That long list of Summer Projects…ah well, there’s always next summer.

Just a random musing on the realities of everyday life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything I can think of…

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.