The Labors of Labor Day

I did not have the Labor Day I expected, but it was a pretty decent holiday.  What makes it extra great is that I have an additional 2 days off this week.  My college is now owned by Orthodox Jews, so we have today and tomorrow off for Rosh Hashanah.  

I expected to spend Labor Day at the old house, cleaning like a madwoman to get it ready for the open house that we have planned for Sunday.  Because of the work that I've done in the past 2 weeks, the house is fairly ready, and because of the work that my spouse has done, the outside of the house is fairly ready, but the cottage still needs a lot of work, the exhausting kind of work, the kind that neither of us wants to do.

We've been getting low on food, so I planned to go for provisions, and because we're still in the middle of a never-ending COVID-19 spike, I wanted to go early to avoid people.  I was able to do that--hurrah!  By the time I got home, my spouse discovered that his department had changed his Philosophy class yet again, and since Sept. 8 is the first day of the term of that class, he settled into getting some work done on that class.  I, too, have a class that needed attention, so I was able to enter all the dates into the syllabus and to set up the rest of the course shell.  Today I'll go back to make sure I didn't miss anything.

By late morning, we returned to the question of what kind of work we wanted to get done, and we decided that he should keep working on his class, while he was feeling energized that way.  I did some work for my seminary class; I watched two video lectures on the first creation story in Genesis.  I learned that the noun for the breath of God is feminine and singular in the Hebrew language.  It's a thought that has brought me much cheer, and I'm not sure why.

I had bought some plug in air fresheners for the house, and I wanted to take them over, plus I wanted to clean the fridge, so mid-afternoon, I headed over.  I am trying to be gentle with myself, as I come face to face with evidence of how bad a housekeeper I am--how bad we both have been.  I'm not sure what all I scrubbed away as I restored order to the fridge.  But at least now, someone can look at it and not say, "I am no longer interested in buying this house.  Clearly the people selling this house can't be trusted if they let the refrigerator get to this state."

By evening I felt exhausted, and I'm not sure why.  My Labor Day work had not been that grueling.  But exhausted I was, and I tumbled into bed just after 8 p.m.  But in many ways, that's not all that unusual for me.  

My day was full, but in different ways than I expected it to be.  I got work done, but different work than I expected.  Now to see what this Rosh Hashanah day off brings.