My Demented Need to be Productive

When my husband gets a day off from work, with no church or social obligations, he enjoys himself. He goes golfing, watches as many episodes of his favorite sitcoms on DVD as he possibly can in one sitting, goes to the coffee shop, makes new friends, and never worries about being productive.

Must be nice.

I am what you might call a “task-oriented” person. I can’t relax unless I’ve first accomplished something.  Or, more accurately, until I’ve made a to-do list that takes hours if not multiple days to complete and finished everything on it. At the moment, this day off is looking far more like the sort of work day my mom would have assigned to us kids growing up, every few months, to help her reclaim the disaster zone that was once her tidy house. I guess I’ve become a lot like her, only I don’t have offspring yet to become my forced laborers, so it’s just me.

I could defer some of these tasks to Dave, but he’s working all day and this stuff is more “project”-y tasks rather than normal chores. Either way, as I said before, I have to work so I can relax. I’m a twisted puppy.

Among my many tasks for today, I’ve assigned myself the waste-not-want-not duty of turning the root veggies we got from our CSA (which we can’t eat until phase two of our nutrition makeover: The Core Plan) into puree to be frozen for later fall soups. 

I just finished cleaning out the bathroom, living room, kitchen, and dining room, and doing all our laundry.

Then I cooked 2 lbs. worth of chickpeas (much cheaper to buy dried beans, soak them overnight, and cook them for an hour or two than buying a tiny little 14 oz. can for the same price.)

I’ve still got to make curried cauliflower and chicken satays for dinner, run to Target (strictly adhering to my list so as not to be lured into the spending web that Target weaves for me better than Shelob does to a hobbit), and do some ironing.

If I sufficiently complete most of my list, I’m going to whip out my sewing machine, a hand-me-down from my mom, and fiddle with it to see if I can thread it myself and get one step closer to sewing my own clothes. I’ve got some dark brown slacks just begging to be hemmed into shorts.

This my friends, is a day off.