Staycation: All I Ever Wanted

For the first time since I was in college, I have taken an entire week of staycation.

I had not intended to: I scheduled for this week off some months ago and figured I'd go to Seattle or Westchester or New Hampshire or North Carolina or somewhere and see someone. But I went to Seattle the second-to-last weekend in May and ConQuesT on Memorial Day weekend and as this week grew closer, I realized increasingly that I did not want to go anywhere. I thought about canceling the days off and saving them for later.

But 'taking time off to do nothing' is, actually, something I love. It feels wasteful, but in the way that buying a gorgeous expensive costume piece is wasteful. I love it, but there are so many more practical uses for time or money. terrycloth takes a staycation every December and I am always jealous of him for it.

So this time, I decided to be impractical and wasteful and decadent and take a week off work and go absolutely nowhere.

It has been glorious.

koogrr once told me that if he took several days off work and had no particular plans, then he found there was actually enough time to do all the things he wanted to do in ordinary life. Enough time to clean and do yardwork and create art and run errands and exercise and everything else. That's how I feel right now. I have enough time.

Thursday morning I did my usual exercise route, which takes me near an IHOP. I started writing this from the IHOP, where I stopped to get New York Cheesecake pancakes. They don't have those any more! I got tiramisu pancakes instead, which are equally decadent and also pretty good. :9

I have been going slowly through the list of backed-up chores on my staycation. Actually, I started on chores the weekend before last:

Two Sundays ago: Thoroughly cleaned the cat litter-box area (about two hours)
Last Thursday: Mowed some of the weeds in the yard down to uniform height (about an hour).
Saturday: Mowed the rest of weeds in the yard to uniform height (three hours).
Sunday: Cleaned the kitchen (two hours).
Monday: Ran three loads of laundry.
Tuesday: Lut and I rescued the sturdiest of the bookcases from the basement. I scrubbed it down and we put it in the living room (about an hour -- this was surprisingly time-consuming).
Wednesday: spent an hour decluttering in the living room.
Thursday: Another two hours decluttering
Friday: Another hour or two decluttering the living room, which is starting to look noticeably less cluttered.

What else have I done? Bike rides on Friday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday (around 80 miles total.) A chunk of writing on "His Angel", the prequel story to "A Rational Arrangement". A little writing on "A Rational Arrangement" -- I am hoping to do more this weekend, as my buffer has gone from 6-10 entries down to 1 (it had gone to zero this morning! But I fixed that). Hoping to get it back up to 3 by Sunday, and perhaps to finish the initial draft of "His Angel". Watched some videos with Lut and went to Red Lobster with him. Played a lot of Puerto Rico and some other video games.

It's been great. I need to do yardwork again this weekend, which I am not really looking forward to, but all the rest of it, even the cleaning, I kind of enjoy. The problem with yardwork is that you always need to do it again a week later, but when I clean and/or declutter things take quite a while to build back up to cluttered and dirty again. Neither Lut nor I are much for cleaning, but in ordinary course we'll put things away after using them and wipe up spills when they happen. Even the cat takes a while to trash her area. :D So when I finish, I should have a few months of reasonably-clean house with fairly modest efforts to maintain it. This makes me happy.

All of this makes me almost unreasonably happy, for how mundane and everyday it all is. Love to you all, my friends. ♥