Ah, Productivity. Or, My Very Expensive Crack Habit

It was a combination of things, really. The sun was out; it was warm. Spring Break was ending and I was hit by the realization that I won't have time off again until late July, and then it will be time for research, so it's not really "time off" as much as it's "time to stare blankly into space and hope some insight comes to me." So everything had to get done, or at least started this weekend, so that I could have some hope of finishing someday.

1. We started Spring Cleaning, which for me included dusting the horrible chandeliers in the entryway and dining room. Stuff got picked up, vacuumed, dusted, scrubbed.

2. I paid all the bills. Suck, suck suck suck.

3. I watered the plants, and took the dead ones outide. There were lots of dead ones, mostly because I'd planted bulbs to force indoors, but didn't use enough force. Or something, because nothing happened, and we had 7 pots of dirt in the dining room with nothing green growing from them. It was sad, really. But they're outside now, and I feel MUCH better.

4. We made a Home Depot run, and while John got bolts and nuts, I browsed paint chips, looking for the perfect color for the office. I came home with 317 different options...basically every paint chip they had. Do we want French blue and brown? Orange and celery green? Something tonal? Cool? Warm? I was only able to decide that I don't want the room to be purple or brown. And it's not that I don't like purple or all brown (and why do I find myself apologizing to colors?) Maybe it should be a warm terra cotta with blue accent? So John got his small bag of bolts, and I needed a large bag, for all the paint chips.

5. We browsed the dollar bins at Michaels, and I got paper for my analysis class handouts. Also, I got a BAD case of the giggles. See, there was this yarn, and it looked exactly like a hair ball. You could make a sweater, and your cat could cough up some junk on your chest, and you wouldn't even have to wipe it off because it would never show. This thought made me laugh so hard that John wouldn't walk next to me; he didn't want to be "the guy walking with the crazy laughing lady" or something, and we had the most morose checkout girl I've ever had at Michaels (you expect the folks at Kinkos to be surly, but at Michaels? Aren't they happy just to be around all the crafty stuff?), but I even got her going with the giggles. No, I didn't buy the hairball yarn. Yet.

6. I finished the Lion and Blue hat, based on a well-loved book of my childhood about a lion that loves a Brazilian blue butterfly.



It's a beautiful story of lifelong love, preserving the planet, and surviving the journey. It's been stuck in my head for months, so I got the book from the attic and wept as I read it to John. It's tattered, but it's there. And the hat:



7. I knit 15 more rows on the cabled sleeve. Oh yes I did.

8. I made no-knead bread. It's got an 18 hour first rise, and a 3 hour second rise. It's TOTALLY worth the wait.



We've got plain, whole wheat, and herbs de Provence. When are you coming over for a sandwich?

9. I weeded about 5 square feet of the yard. This took 2 hours. When I came across a huge colony of ants, I stopped. Then I itched all over.

10. John finished his workbench, using me as a counterweight. I am that much closer to getting the old one to use as a potting bench. Color me happy.

11. We rode bikes into town for iced coffee and internet.

12. We had a feast of pork roast, potato pancakes, sauteed peppers, and applesauce. Our neighbor brought over some fresh pork wonton soup she'd made. My God.

13. I graded all of my real analysis midterms. And I put stickers on them. Who doesn't like stickers?

We weren't the only ones being productive this weekend. A whole lot of teeny bugs hatched in the sunshine and all of our neighborhood was covered in little swarms of nastiness. The bugs even fought their way into our living room, via a badly caulked hole for an ancient phone jack. They didn't last long though, what with the ferocious beasts living on the inside, who have nothing better to do than to wait for a tasty snack to come through the teeny hole in the floorboard. Bugs make great toys for cats. Cats that play with bugs all night. Even if those bugs are behind the blinds so the cats thwap thwap thwap because that bug is going to taste so much better than kibble, if only it would come back to this side of the window treatments. Even if the humans are trying to sleep because it's 3 o'clock in the morning and FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD WOULD YOU STOP BATTING AT THOSE THINGS.

Brita asks me often if I ever sleep, and the answer is that yes, I do. Then she asks how much I spend each week on speed and crack. Is it my eternal optimism that make me so productive? Or am I preparing for the end so I'm getting as much done as possible? What she doesn't understand, I think, is that I'm not a glass half-empty person, nor am I a glass half-full person. I'm really a person who knows that a refill is coming, very very soon, so it doesn't matter.