In Review: One Week Off

A well-deserved week off was a pleasure. No school work hanging over heads. No guilt. No ridiculously inflated plans. My only mistake was in putting off until the end of the week all my outdoor activities. We had a rainy weekend. A rainy weekend is always lovely, but a few of my plans came to naught.

What did I do?

• The living room curtains.
• The front hall closet.
• Moved the rose bush.
• Painted the pantry. The white paint is quite spiffy. Today Ally and I did some pantry reorganization.
• Ally sewed doll clothes by herself. I did help her a bit one afternoon this week instead.
• Sorted through storage boxes. This was an ordeal. The kids had been in the closet and reorganized all the boxes into a fort. Before I could begin sorting there was a 2 hour clean up session. In the end I had 3 trash bags for Goodwill and a couple of boxes of clothes for a friend. This is very impressive. You could ask why I had all that junk sitting around in the first place, but be kind and don't mention it.
• I bought a box of apples from a "wholesale guy." It was one of those "Arkansas" experiences. Sometimes I have them. He sold a bushel of apples for only $15. This seemed like a really good deal, about 36 cents a pound. They were quite soft, so we hustled and made 52 cups of applesauce (plus what we ate while we worked). We froze it in Ziploc bags; 4 cups to a bag.

We finally made it to the apple orchard this week. We only picked two small bags of apples. Just enough for eating fresh. I am hugely frustrated with the Christmas knitting. I've been searching, for days, for the pattern I was sure I had kept. I was sure I had knitting patterns in only two file folders. That was a misplaced confidence. I have found patterns in three places and am still searching. This always happens to me. I think I am organized, but I'm not. Not really.

The time I spent on the couch watching a movie with Arden, in the middle of the day (gasp!), might have been better spent organizing. The hours I spent reading The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection could be considered wasted. Or I could consider it a little vacation. A vacation to a sunny land in which food, cooked with love, undoubtedly tastes better and a mechanic judges a man's character by the car he drives. A vacation under a sunny African sky, with a "traditionally built" woman drinking red bush tea at a rate of 100 cups per week, and where good-hearted, common sense people triumph in the end.

"Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout."

That, my friends, is good, common sense. And maybe part of the appeal of Alexander McCall Smith's book is the appeal of a culture that moves at different pace, not constantly measuring what they have accomplished in a day. Or a week. In that sense it may have been the perfect book for my week off.