Days Off, Days on My Feet

I have decided to take another easy day today.  In part, it's because I have to be at work slightly earlier today.  In part, it's because I wanted another morning of hot pumpkin pecan cinnamon rolls and fresh coffee and the potential to do some writing.

It's also because yesterday wasn't quite as much a day off for my aching legs as I expected.

My sister-in-law is coming for a visit, and she arrives on Thursday evening.  She's staying in our cottage, the one she was living in until a year ago.  We haven't made any improvements since she left, but my spouse did use it as a workspace, so there was a lot of clean up to do--saw dust, regular dust, some griminess that accumulates when no one lives in a space.

Yesterday was the day when we got the cottage livable again.  We had planned to do some of that in the past 2 week-ends, but we didn't.  Yesterday we dusted and wiped down with wet towels and dusted some more and vacuumed.  The cottage is still far from perfect, but it's ready.  And since my sister-in-law lived there, she knows what to expect.  And she gets to stay there for free, which is much cheaper than a hotel or an AirBnB would charge.

We also did some other chores.  My spouse has been needing new shoes, so off we went at a time when we expected the store to be less crowded.  Happily, we encountered no crowds, and we got a great deal--plus, my spouse found shoes, which is not always something that happens.  Along the way, we went to Home Depot for flower seeds and garden hose repair kits.

Once we got the cottage ready, we did some sorting of our various garden sheds and benches that are also storage space for pool supplies.  We weren't storing as much junk as I was afraid we were, but we did sort and reorganize.

By the end of the day, my legs ached, along with many of my joints.  I thought about how sore I felt for a woman who had taken a day off.  But then I realized that it wasn't really a day off in some ways, because I was on my feet for most of the day.  

We ended the day on the porch with our mandolins trying to pick out the melody of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" (a Lead Belly tune also known as "In the Pines" perhaps made famous most recently by Nirvana).  It's not a very hard tune, so we also had time to talk some music theory, about key signatures and sharps and flats, theory that my spouse has internalized but astonishes me.  It reminds me of when my beloved undergrad English professor Dr. Swanson told me that all fiction must have conflict, and I ascertained that it did not, and she challenged me to give her one example.

Literary theory, music theory, political theory--why is my initial response to ascertain that the theory is wrong?

 

It was a good day off--as is the case with many days off, it was such a good day, I'd like a repeat.  But it is not to be--the campus awaits.