Notes on a Half Day off (Friday)

I had scheduled a half day of PTO yesterday.  Awhile ago, before the mob tried to take the Capitol on the afternoon of Epiphany (how strange it still is to write that!), one of my best friends and roommates from undergrad years was planning to stay with us on her swing through the East Coast.  First she and her grown daughter would go to D.C. for the inauguration, then they'd come here.

Those plans began to unravel after the events of Epiphany, but still, she thought she could have a good time in D.C., getting food she couldn't find in Butte and spending time with her daughter.  But then AirBnB canceled all reservations in the D.C. area.  She thought she could get a full refund on her plane tickets, so we decided it was better for her to cancel and to try this trip again later in the year.  My hope is that we'll be more widely vaccinated by then.  When she first made the plans in early November, I was thinking about travel and COVID-19 exposure differently, and there weren't the more contagious strains.

I decided to go ahead and take the PTO hours, even though I didn't have friends to pick up at the airport.  My school is in the process of being purchased by another school, and when the transfer happens, our unused PTO will disappear.  That transfer may happen soon, so I am also taking a PTO day on Monday.

Yesterday was delightful.  After an easy morning at work, I arrived home to a spouse with ideas for a pasta lunch.  We did some cooking and then settled in for the next episode of The Handmaid's Tale.  We did some work on the front porch; my spouse needed to get ready for his 6:30 p.m. Philosophy class, and I did some grading for my online class.

I shifted to reading a book when my laptop needed to be plugged in to recharge.  I finished Nick Hornby's Just Like You, a delightful read, filled with nuggets like this one:  "In Lucy's experience, these were the two genders, boys and readers.  She wished there was as much gender fluidity as people seemed to think" (p. 223).

In the late afternoon, I made this Facebook post: 

"A guy on a bicycle rides by with "Start Me Up" playing on some sort of sound system. I'm reading on the front porch, and I look up. Just for a minute, the slant of late afternoon light is the same, and the temperature is the same, as the afternoon I first heard that song, in September, in the 11th grade, in Knoxville, Tennessee, when the future stretched out bright ahead of me.

The future is still bright and ahead of me--there's just not as much of it as there used to be."

My spouse went in to teach his class, and I got settled in the front room at my laptop.  I have decided that I will write 1000 words of my apocalyptic novel each week, and that the most likely time to do that is when my spouse is teaching.  Last night was week 3 of writing over 1000 words on a Friday night.

I find myself longing to redo yesterday--to ignore chores, to ignore the books I need to be reading for my certification program, to ignore grades.  But happily, it's a Saturday.  There will be time to do a bit of all of it.