I usually sleep in on my days off. Sometimes I sleep way in. But not today. I had a 10 am appointment at the hospital to get vaccinated against more nasty bugs that I might find myself face to face with at work. The system of hospitals that I work for is undergoing some change, most of which will actually happen at my location. The entire building is supposed to be demolished and three new buildings built in it’s place. As such, things are moving out of the first part to be destroyed. One of those things is the Employee Health office. So I had to drive to the other side of town to “the mother ship”, or main hospital campus, to get my shot. I hate going over there. I don’t know where anything is. And the place is huge… it even extends over the road by way of a nifty glass walkway. But I didn’t get to go across that.
I’m moving across town in a few weeks. My new apartment is right across the street from the mother ship so I decided to stop by and pick up a form I needed for the utility company. Then I stopped at Pier 1 (my old employer… have I ever mentioned that?) to say hi, catch up, and get some packing boxes out of their stockroom. Once I made it back home I decided to get caught up on some TV shows that I’d missed. The show in question recently ended for good and I hadn’t been able to watch the last four episodes yet. But I’m all caught up now.
Then I hit the computers. Two of them, to be exact. I’d recently been able to get my sister’s old Dell up and running with Windows XP (gag). I’d installed a few old games from back in my PC days to give it a good testing. It passed. But my parents want the computer for something, so I cleaned all of my garbage off of it and got it pretty much back to day one status. It’s never been on the internet, so I don’t have to worry about any of the numerous things that find a way to creep into Windows over the net. But I wasn’t done computing just yet. I took to my computer… or more precisely… my files. I cleaned out old, duplicate, and unused music, videos, pictures… everything. I dumped a bunch of programs that I no longer use (which, by the way, is a simple drag and drop procedure on a Mac). I reorganized my documents, archived a bunch of old stuff in zip files, and even went into Safari and cleaned out my bookmarks. After all was said and done, I reclaimed about four gigabytes of hard drive space. Not too shabby.
So is this what a day off is supposed to be like? It’s so out of character for me to actually accomplish something on days off that I’m a little confused. Do other people actually do things on their days off? Or have I violated some unspoken rule of off time by being productive? Now that I’ve had a taste of off-day productivity, will I ever been able to enjoy my favorite sin of sloth again? All of the things I did today had an almost drug-like effect on me… I’m craving more productivity…
Hmm… where’d I put those photo albums….
