Reflections on just another summer weekend

Topics/tags: Overcommitment, Code camps

A few days ago, I posted about my plans for just another summer weekend. I had promised myself that I’d reflect back on whether or not I’d succeed at what I planned [1]. Here goes.

I stayed up too late on Friday night. I can’t remember why.

On Saturday morning, I got up at about 7:30 to attend Ridiculous Days. I was relatively good. The only place I shopped was at the bookstore and I did not purchase all that much [2]. I got a new Orange Tigers sweatshirt [3]. That should help on mid-fall football nights and early-spring tennis afternoons. They had umbrellas for $3.00 each. Umbrellas seem to disappear around our house. I picked up five. Of course, I thought the were Grinnell College umbrellas and they turned out to be GHS umbrellas. Still, no biggie. And I bought a few red pens. I bought no books. I bought no tchotchkes. And, as I said, the only place I shopped was at the bookstore.

I should mention that I saw two friends at the bookstore who read my musings and they both said, Shouldn’t you be asleep rather than looking at books? They were probably right. But I didn’t spend much time and I was glad to get some umbrellas.

After getting back from the sale, I did a lot of work with Michelle around the house. We hung a bunch of paintings [4]. We rearranged some furniture and moved the TV. I don’t recall what else we did.

Then I took a nap. Yay naps!

I woke up to do the book sort at Friends of Drake Library. As I said, I was able to bring over four boxes of books. I will admit that I’m not fond of the new sorting procedures, which have evolved over the years. It’s clear that people are frustrated from too many years of too many leftovers from the book sale and that is affecting choices. Oh well, that’s how life goes sometimes. I’ve always been fond of Put it out and see if it sells, but I know how difficult that can make things. I did grab a few books, mostly those I could not bear to see hit the garbage bin [5].

I don’t recall what I did in the afternoon [6]. I think we hung some more pictures and did a bit more rearranging. I worked on my email a bit. I mused. And, um, I think I just relaxed.

I slept in on Sunday morning. It was an awesome feeling to be able to sleep in.

Once I woke up, I started Sunday with some unplanned straightening. I got fed up with a few of the piles that tend to accumulate in our house. I’m not sure if it happens to you, but we regularly seem to have the issue that one person puts something down temporarily, another person puts something on top of that first thing, and another puts something on top of that other thing. At that point, everyone decides Oh, that pile isn’t mine and it sits there for, well, forever. In any case, we have a lot of those piles in our house. I worked on a pile on the stairs, a pile in the corner of the kitchen, and a pile in the living room. It took some time, but I felt a sense of accomplishment. Plus, I identified some stuff to get rid of [7].

After that, I spent about nine hours working on materials for the code camp. That felt like time well spent. And, believe it or not, but it was fun.

Okay, so what didn’t I do? Let’s see. I didn’t work on the plant life around our house. But I hadn’t really expected to do that. I spent less time rearranging the front room than I had expected. However, I did spend more time straightening around the house, so it balances out. I spent a little less time on the code camp than I had planned. But it was enough. I didn’t spend time on Project Callisto. It turns out that that’s okay; I learned on Monday that the project may be going in very different directions [8]. I had a wide variety of medium-length tasks to do for the department and for my fall fellowship. I got none of those done [9].

In the original musing, I wrote, there’s probably a bunch more that I’ve forgotten and that will come up. It turns out that nothing else came up. That probably means that I wasn’t paying enough attention.

Still, it was a relatively productive weekend and a relatively relaxing weekend. I’ll call that a success.

[1] Did I promise to tell you what I accomplished? I don’t think so. But, hey, it only seems fair.

[2] If I’d known that our code camp needed lanyards, I might have bought some of those.

[3] I’ve promised Michelle that I’ll give away or throw away one of my old Tigers sweatshirts.

[4] That reminds me, I still have to find places for the paintings we took down.

[5] Some old Latin prayer books. I gave those to a friend. A copy of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that I thought one of my students would enjoy reading. And a copy of Sammy, just because it has a name that some people call me. I’ll probably get rid of that soon.

[6] Clearly, I was still behind on sleep.

[7] I was able to throw out a bunch of paperwork from when I was Committee Chair of our local BSA troop. I found a bunch of MathCounts materials that I can give to the new MathCounts coordinator. And there were a few old textbooks that no one wants that I could recycle.

[8] I’ll muse more on Project Callisto in a week or two.

[9] I also got none of that work done Monday or Tuesday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll avoid distractions on Wednesday. Of course, I need to find those messages to deal with, but that’s another issue.

Version 1.0 of 2018-07-13.