The wife and kids snuck away to Presque Isle to spend some quality summer vacation time with the family. I've stayed behind trying to use some kid-free-nights to catch up on outstanding project work from the last two semesters (yes, I'm two semesters behind on my school work). I wrapped up last semester tonight and hope to wrap up last spring tomorrow. I was hoping to squeeze in some homework from my present semester, but I'm just too tired. One of the reasons I'm too tired is that I decided to walk to and from work today. This is part of my master plan to deal with my punishing work and school schedule using the counterintuitive time management strategy of taking MORE time to commute to work rather than less. My reasoning is that time spent walking is more conducive to thinking (more so than driving a car or biking) and that an extra two hours per day dedicated to nothing more than extended, solitary meditation will improve my mental health. I surmise that improved mental health coupled with this extended meditation time will make me more productive at work and school, not less. I'll be figuring things out all the while, walking and thinking of new ways to do things and whatnot. After all, Thomas Jefferson could not have been mistaken when he said "There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue." It all sounds good. But I'm too damn tired tonight to realize any extra-homework-productivity.
Amy & the girls spent the week in Tenants Harbor, ME. It's a beautiful place. It signals summer. It's special to us. It's where we got married. We've been climbing those rocks and jumping in the cold Atlantic and warming ourselves by that fire for 10 years.
We just had lunch there...beer selection was fantastic...food even better...
For Valentine's Day we dipped fruit in chocolate. For the superbowl we made pasties.
I made pretzels for last week's Vikings Saints game. We had a bunch of people over and ate wings and drank beer and had an all american family afternoon. My (almost) two year old daughter calls these events "sissaball parties." I have know idea why she does this, but the name is a strangely appropriate way to describe a sport that features so many towering, corpulent hulks. So it stuck and now we feature regular sissaball parties.
What would you do if you were given three months off to do whatever it was you wanted to do? What if you were allowed to hit the pause button on your career, take a break from work during your prime earning years, and just do whatever it was you wanted to do?
This is not a list of my top three songs of last year (they weren't even released last year). They are not my favorite three songs of the year. They aren't even the songs I listened to the most. They are the songs I remember the most.
(all three songs are embedded below the fold)