You Could Say That

It might even be true from a certain point of view.

Susan Helene in comments on yesterday's TT noted that I must be having another busy week. Her clue was my posting another 13 titles off an eleven page list of silly author/title combos which I've done approximately once a month since October whenever I am pressed for either time or ideas.

It wasn't so much about busy as about my normal schedule being thrown off track for the last week with my in-laws out of town and Ed having four out of those six days off work. A lot of regularly scheduled tasks got pushed to the fringes or abandoned in deference of things that can only be done (or at least more easily done) when we're home alone.

I must admit that much of it amounted to hanging out together in the living room with Sweetie and Merlin. I moved my office out to the couch. I saw a whole lot of the back of Ed's head as he played video games on the PC. I read from books. I and sometimes we watched TV or DVD on the large screen HD TV. Ed cooked for us several times and I acted as his gofer and cleaned up after. A couple of times he brought home take out.

Last time his folks went on a week long vacation was the first week of January and that time there was zero hanging out, zero relaxation and sleep could have been measured by the nano second. That was the week of the BIG room make over which I blogged about ad infinitum throughout January and into February.

This time the only chore on the agenda besides meal prep and clean up was laundry and we had let it slide for a couple of weeks in light of having this week to catch it up at our own convenience. Since the laundry facilities are in the hall outside his folks room and they sleep with their door open so Sweetie has access to her doggie door to the yard, I can't do laundry between 9PM and 7AM. Since my MIL does laundry in the afternoons several times a week, I shy away from starting any of mine between noon and the dinner hour. So that leaves the two hours between kitchen clean up and their going to bed at 9PM or 6AM to noon on the days she works. I'm not a morning person.

This is the way things are between October and mid April anyway. As soon as the racing season starts at the dirt track, I'll be having my weekly Saturday home alone from 2PM til after 10PM. Except for the two years I was sitting with Ed's Grandma on those days, that has been my appointed time for laundry and room cleaning chores. Before I got my laptop in fall of 2005 and the WIFI in fall of 2006 that was all time dedicated to as much face time with the PC as I could squeeze in between loads of laundry. Last year, for the first time since race season 2001 which was BPC (Before PC) I actually spent a lot of Saturday afternoons hanging in the back yard with Sweetie and Merlin.

Well this week, counting all of the bedding, there were only six loads. That was nothing compared to the thirteen we did the first week of January.

So in a sense it was a busy week but as I look back over it, I am hard pressed to justify that word. A lot of time got frittered away. I tended to wait until Ed went to bed to get started on my own serious writing work, including post prep, and since he pushed his bedtime past 11PM on most nights that left me with the wee hours and because I wasn't working in the room where he slept, it was hard to resist the temptation to have the TV on. On several occasions I would still be awake when he got up and would then resist laying down at all so I got severely sleep deprived.

This was the case on Wednesday morning. When Ed came out of the bedroom at 7AM I was totally startled. I had been working on Tuesday's post since before midnight. Wednesday was the day his folds were due back and I had a lot of little things to do to get the hosue put back in the condition they left it. There was no way I was going to risk laying down even for a nap before it was all done. This included putting the folded clothes away and dealing with the last load in the dryer, cleaning up the kitchen, moving my 'office' off the couch and back to the bedroom, moving Merlin's kitty condo back to the bedroom.

I probably could have got all that done in ninety minutes or so if I'd pushed it but I managed to spread it out over four by stopping to rest, visit with Ed,. play with Merlin, eat breakfast etc. It was done by noon and I was ready to crash but it took me an hour to wind down. I'd left a wakeup call for four because Tuesday's Oprah had been continued and it had been about hoarding, which is one of my issues as I confessed during the January room project.

So I was severely sleep deprived Wednesday evening and had the option of writing a post something like this one and pushing TT off until Thursday or posting another batch of those silly titles. I knew this rambling post option would take at least an hour and the TT w/ silly titles could be slapped together in fifteen minutes.

Then I slept for ten hours!

I'd hoped to start visiting other TTs and get another snippet of Crystal's story prepared for today's post. But I'd given myself an urgent task that took priority over even going to the library which I've done most Thursday's since the first of the year! I had yet to make the bib slips for the first time books from the last two weeks or pull the bib slips of books returned over the last two weeks from the current items stack and return them to the accordion file and pull the slips of repeat books out of the file and place them in the current items stack.

I figured that would take about an hour. Ha. It took me six and a half hours. Because I kept getting caught up in reading the books or it took me exasperating long times to find a slip in the file which I had stopped keeping organized in the two months leading up to the library closure last April. I had also forgotten to make a slip for a book I'd begun and finished on the same day I checked it out two weeks ago. And hadn't marked the date finished on the last several books I'd finished and moved them to their paper-clipped stack.

A bib slip is a 3X5 slip off a scratch pad with title of book at top of 5 inch edge and author below that. Number of pages at far left edge with the page number I left off on under that. A quick glance and subtraction gives me number of pages left. Every once in a while I send for a bunch with under 150 pages left and target them for finishing. The date begun is noted in bottom left corner with room to put date finished below that. I've been making these since December of 1992 and still have all the ones for library books I never finished but my files for finished books and for books I owned at the time were left behind in the 2001 move. From 93 to 99 I averaged 100 books finished per year. The average hovers around 70 since then.

So I didn't get the bib slip project done until it was too late to go to the library. I rewarded myself by settling down with a book to read at two-thirty. But within twenty minutes I could not keep my eyes open and next thing I know, I'm being called to dinner which was an hour late because my in-laws had had company in the afternoon. I didn't get back from doing dishes until 7:30 and the thought of trying to get a snippet written this evening panicked me so I chose the rambling journal route.

If you came looking for my Friday Snippet, cross your fingers and wish hard. That will be my urgent task for tomorrow. Followed by visiting TT and Snippets.