A Real Weekend

We just had a real, honest-to-gosh weekend. Yeah, I know, you're probably thinking "What's so special about that? They come around every week." Well, yes and no. Yes, they come around, but I'm usually working my butt off on some project or another and am a walking zombie by evening. Which is what happened on Friday: I did a major clean-up on our garage for the first time in two-plus years, tossed out a ton of stuff, reorganized everything, swept, vacuumed, and wiped, until it was actually a useable place again. Didn't stop until it was 9 p.m. and I could barely move.

Yesterday, we slept in a bit. After walking the dogs, having breakfast, and bathing the dogs, it was almost noon and rapidly getting hot again. I decided that I wasn't going to do anything else the rest of the weekend. For once, I was just going to relax for two days. This was actually hard for me to do. Our work schedule in Iraq was 10-12 hours a day, 6 1/2 days a week, with only half of Friday off. If you do that long enough, it gets to be a natural rhythm. Now that I'm a self-employed artist again, I was back into a similar rhythm, only now it's made up of home projects and studio projects, not Iraqi projects. So it was time to break up the rhythm and give myself a meritorious two days off. Hey, that's my rationale, and I'm sticking with it.

So yesterday, I made a lot of progress on a novel (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - a really good book). Last night, we watched Robert Downey, Jr, and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes - an okay movie, kinda fun, certainly not one of the better ones we've ever seen. Today, I walked the dogs, we watched CBS Sunday Morning, and then this afternoon went to wander around the Biltmore Park area. We had a great lunch at P.F. Chang's, visited with our friend Genie Maples, who was manning the desk at Echo Gallery, and browsed through Barnes and Noble. Then we came home and I watched the NASCAR race (it was a pretty dull one, but who cares).

All in all, a nice, quiet, lazy weekend. Two days off. Unheard of.

Tomorrow: back to work.