Snow Days

It is nearing 10 PM on Friday night, and my to-do list for Saturday is growing. It looks like any other Saturday to-do list, with the exception of taking time out to watch Star Trek with my dad and to see Casablanca with a friend. I rarely do anything fun on Saturdays.

And yes, those films are on the to-do list, because if they weren’t they wouldn’t happen.

Here’s the frustrating part: I’m coming off of three snow days. THREE. And, as we just began the semester on Monday, I had nothing to grade, I had nothing really to plan, nothing really to do. So how did I spend my snow days?

I watched movies, I cleaned up my laptop, I ran some errands, I wrote a reflection piece for a professor in BG, I picked up after myself (something that didn’t happen during the last set of snow days), and today I had lunch and dinner with friends.

As I’m looking at my Saturday list, there’s not a single thing on it that couldn’t have been done in the past three days. Clearly, I have a PhD in time-wasting. But aside from perhaps the movies, I don’t really feel like I was wasting time. I slept in. I relaxed. I thought. I wrote. I read. And then there’s that old adage about time spent doing things you enjoy is not time wasted.

If the snow days hadn’t happened, my Saturday list would look exactly the same. But I’d probably be a little more tired, and a little wearier in the doing of the list.

At any rate, I’m gonna tackle a few things on the list before I go to bed tonight. Then maybe tomorrow won’t feel quite so overwhelming.