Weekend Plans Post: Three Day Weekend!
So I got on the Google and looked up, with quotes, “The Three Gates Of Summer”.
I wanted to know “who came up with that phrase to describe Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day?”, because, you know, that’s pretty evocative.
And the only two hits were me. Which, seriously, can’t be right. Duck Duck Go was worse than useless and I wasn’t about to get on AskJeeves and Twitter didn’t have any hits either. So… “Three Gates of Summer”. That’s me!
And so we’re going to walk through the first of the Three Gates of Summer this weekend. Wearing masks, most likely. We’ll probably grill hot dogs (or, heck, boil them) and… well, once upon a time, I’d talk about the various get-togethers we’d have with other people where we make dessert and they grill meat for us or we are in charge of appetizers and they grill meat for us…
But the world is a certain way at this point and so we’re not doing much.
It’ll be nice to have a day off.
Otherwise, we’ll be playing with our gaming group on Saturday Night (we finished our D&D module last session so we’re going to take a Saturday off and play virtual board games of some sort) and… otherwise, I have a jog scheduled. I have some video gaming scheduled.
“What about laundry?”, you ask. Well… Laundry has evolved since the pandemic. Sure, Friday Night was the dedicated Laundry night. Start off with towels (of which there were legion from all of the showers that got taken during the week) and then the other various sorted categories. The reds. The light delicates. The dark delicates. The stuff that gets a fabric softener sheet. Did we change the bedding last week? Well, then we’re changing it this week. Ideally, everything gets done by Sunday afternoon allowing for everything to be put away by bedtime Sunday Night.
But now? Well… laundry has changed. Outfits have changed. There are days when it’s just pajama pants and a hoodie or a loose vacation-style shirt. If one does not go jogging, one can get away with wearing them two days in a row. If one goes jogging, well, those clothes were outside where people were probably recently breathing. Better throw them into the washer once the jog is over. And, hey, while those are in there… why not throw the pajama pants and hoodie in there with them?
Showers have changed. If you’re not going into work every day, you’re not needing to take the courtesy shower before going in. If you don’t jog, you’re likely to have done very little other than telecommute and maybe some light cooking. Sure, you shower before you go into work, on the days you go in, but you immediately shower after coming home to make sure that nobody’s ambient breath is stuck to you anywhere (and now you’re doing laundry AGAIN). Throw the towel in there with the outfit.
And now Friday nights have no more laundry until things get back to normal… or, more accurately, there is too much Friday Night sprinkled liberally throughout the week. I mean, if you’re telecommuting and you just feel like changing the sheets on a Wednesday instead of a Saturday… Why not? Give yourself a little bit of luxury. It’s not like you can’t get up during the meeting and throw the wash into the dryer, right? It’s 10 feet away and they’re on speaker.
I digress. So this three-day weekend is wiiiiiide open. But that means less than it did in previous years.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is Alice being interrupted from rabbit kicking her mouse and being irritated that we’re thrusting our black boxes at her when she’s trying to concentrate.)
Getting out of town to visit the ‘rents, under the reasoning neither of us has seen anyone for the past month and none of us has the ‘rona so it’s probably okay for us to hang around with each other…Report
If it doesn’t rain (and isn’t death humid), maybe mowing the lawn Saturday? Starting to look like it needs it, and I could use a little different exercise.
Other than that, I don’t know. Maybe a little more continuing-ed reading; am trying to teach myself probability theory. Or maybe I continue planning labs that could be done online for fall, just in case, even though my uni wants to re open in-person (about which I am apprehensive, I suspect the big wave hasn’t hit here yet but is coming…)
Late next week I plan my first really big jaunt out since the end of February – a trip to a long-term family-run open-air garden center in the next town over. If I don’t chicken out and feel like it’s “unsafe.” (This is something people are warning me about, that I’m getting a little agoraphobic). I want some kind of nice big ideally-perennial, ideally pollinator-friendly plants to replace the rosemary that went belly up in my garden last year.
But not this weekend; it will be too busy being Memorial Day. And also, it’s supposed to rain part of the weekend…Report
Out of town for us. Going to the other side of the mountains to stay at a cabin with another couple we spend time with. Not sure how long we will stay though. But it is a typical Oregon spring, so rainbowy!Report
I’m sure this is apocryphal but I will share it anyway. I think it came from Vonnegut about how the people who were best suited to survive being prisoners of war during WW2 were the ones who washed, shaved, and took care of themselves every single day. To the best of their ability from whatever the National Socialists saw fit to provide them.
The ones who didn’t last were the scrubby ones who had various o’clock shadows, reeked to high heaven, etc.
Maybe I have it backwards. What does this have to do with the price of bratwursts in occupied Berlin? With varying days of working from home and going into the county clerk office, my routine is off. If I skip showering, I’ll wake up feeling itchy and miserable. A couple times I’ve woken up at 2 a.m. feeling scratchy and took a shower while cursing myself for skipping a day.
I have no idea how the fuck I lived in my Colorado basement apartment. Now if I miss washing my hair one day, I need to wash it ASAP. And swimming in an ocean / pool doesn’t mean I can skip these ablutions.
I’m going to play with Tabletop Simulator a bit more. I already did the tutorial. Maybe I’ll find a game. Maybe not. I’m still gun-shy about board games because I’ve forgotten so many of the rules. I know how impatient others can become with new players because I had that tendency.Report
I had to call a money guy this afternoon (looking at houses we may move to is suddenly going faster than my ability to be prepared). Even though it’s Saturday afternoon, and it was a phone call, I was “I didn’t take a shower this morning and I can’t talk money feeling grungy.” So shower first, then call the money guy. Good t-shirt and cargo shorts was fine (sorry Saul, it’s Colorado), but I needed to be clean.Report
Aside from sleeping in an hour later, I kept my routine the same while working from home: Shower, coffee, 20-30 minutes of reading, and then sit down and get to work. The routine made it easier to adjust to work mode despite being at home.Report
Anecdotally, in this, I can tell that I do MUCH better on the days when I force myself to get up at a “reasonable” hour (between 5 and 6 am, for me – close to what I did in the before-times), and do a workout, and then wash and dress and do my daily language practice on Duolingo, and do piano practice for a bit. And then, since it’s technically summer break for me, settle in and either do some continuing-ed work, or plan ahead for fall teaching (in case we do start out online, which I am half-suspecting, given that we’re starting to see an increase in cases here).
I’m not quite sure what the psychological thing of it is – whether it’s me controlling what I can control, or that on some level I feel “guilty” if I skip a workout (other than on rest days) or my Duolingo or the work-for-school, or whether it’s that the continuing-ed reading and piano practice and stuff engages my brain, and I get sad and squirrelly when my brain isn’t engaged enough. But yes, for me, I HAVE to have a set schedule or else I spiral down very fast. I am just glad I learned this fairly early on.
In the afternoons, if the weather is good, i go out and weed the garden/trim back the rapidly growing hedges/mow when it needs it.And then I shower and spend the evening on some kind of craft project
In other words, except for a higher level of yard maintenance, I live much as I did in the before-times. And it helps. I still get moments of viscerally missing seeing my out-of-town friends (traveling is not a good idea right now) or just running to a craft store for the fun of it (I don’t think it’s worth the risk of exposure; people here are bad at masks and social distancing). But I’m better than I was at the start of this.Report
We have been inching for a couple of years now towards moving 60 miles to be closer to the granddaughters and to have a smaller place. (We don’t exactly rattle in this house, but only because we have accumulated a lot of stuff over 32 years.) Suddenly two weeks ago we said, “Virus, shmirus, we’re doing it this summer.” And tomorrow we are going to look at a house whose listing my wife is enamored of. I wasn’t as taken, but have to admit that it checks off all of the important boxes.Report