Work: Useless time sucks for wasted days

In the January issue of Real Simple magazine, there was an extensive list of "mini chores" that the editors suggested you could use to occupy a spare five minutes for "that juicy accomplishment buzz."  These tasks included things like tossing three old items from your fridge, dusting your houseplants, and creating an emergency kit with bottled water, flashlight and canned goods.

With all of the snow days we've had lately, I've had enough free time to alphabetize the contents of the refrigerator and grow houseplants from seed. However, the fact that I still own a magazine that I bought out of desperation a month ago for a flight that I didn't actually get to take, suggests that I'm not mini chore-oriented (especially since one item on the list instructs the reader to eliminate half of her magazine stack). 

You, on the other hand, may be the kind of hyper-efficient gal who spends her last free five minutes zipping around the house with a small can of white paint, making touch-ups as needed, per the list.  If so, you don't need Real Simple; you need to relax. Allow me to be of service with these useless time sucks, gleaned from my most recent snow day:

• Make elaborate plans and execute them poorly.  You might, for example, promise your children that you'll make homemade playdoh, though you actually have no expertise in this area.  Use an untested recipe from the Internet, so as to avoid success in your endeavor.  Attempt to salvage the sticky mess that results by baking their haphazard creations into a hot blobby mess.  Voila! You've created both a mess and more clutter.

• Plan an unfeasible escape.  If you are like me, your vacation budget is minimal at best.  This should not stop you from shopping airfares to Bali.  Do exhaustive research: plan outings, compare villas, deliberate over whether you should rent a car or just hire a driver.  Most importantly, convince yourself that you not only deserve this trip, you practically require it.  Consider it a medical necessity, as you are clearly vitamin D deficient. Have faith that your sense of entitlement alone will pay the bill.

• Build resentments.  I find that winter in New England is the perfect setting for this, but I suppose it could work elsewhere.  My method: find someone from a climate less punishing than your own (if you're in my neck of the woods, this includes pretty much everyone but the Inuits), notice how much happier/healthier/all-around better he or she looks than you.  Look at your own see-through-living-under-a-log skin and squishy middle.  Think about how much easier it would be to look as good as Mr./Ms. Rosy Glow if you had access to some decent produce or had been able to leave the house in the past couple of months.  Direct your anger at him or her.  (Helpful hint: You could do this with a copy of People, but I like to personalize it by fixating on the Facebook friend who keeps posting radiant shots of her healthy active life in Florida.  Like I don't know that she has totally capped her teeth since high school...cheater.)

• Compile a list of grievances.  The resentments that you've constructed in the previous exercise are a great segue here.  The fact that my only outdoor activity is digging a dog latrine in snow higher than my knees while others are providing photographic evidence of frolicking in shorts --that makes the list. You should also think about any naggingly incomplete home repairs, recent failures or disappointments, mistreatment at the hands of co-workers and/or service staff... Make sure you don't leave anything out.  You want an accurate catalogue of the bleakness that is your life.

• Ponder your failures.  Here's an example: After grimly digging a giant dog toilet in the backyard, I make hot chocolate for the girls.  Little E dissolves in sobs and recriminations, because, apparently, she doesn't care for the mug I've chosen.  Big E repeatedly points out to me that Little E has just said "hate," which, in case I have forgotten, she is not to say.  Clearly, as their mother, I am responsible for these foibles in my offspring.  I think about all the ways that I've failed them and try to decide which of these spawned these particular behaviors.  To kill some more time, I fret about how these little quirks will present themselves in adulthood.

• Lament your wasted time. There's little sense in frittering away a day if you're not going to spend some time mentally berating yourself for your lack of productivity.  Think of all of the things you could have accomplished with this time.  Look around at the mess in your house, but don't pick it up.  Instead, spend the remaining time asking yourself why you are so profoundly lazy, resenting those responsible for the mess or anyone else who has failed to address it, and amending your anguish over the enormous pigsty that your home has become to your list of grievances. 

If, when you've completed these steps, you find that you still have some time on your hands, get online and consult the long-term forecast to see when you can expect the next wasted snow day.  If you're anywhere near me, it shouldn't be a long wait. So maybe you should get on that emergency kit.

Work: Snow Day

When I found out that school would be cancelled Wednesday due to impending snow, I envisioned myself sleeping in, watching the snow fall from the warmth of my living room, and finally tackling that pile of essays that I've been dutifully toting back and forth from work untouched.

When I had this vision, clearly I was in some sort of pre-property owning, pre-child having time warp.  Instead I pulled on my glamorous new boots and spent my day like this:

I forced the family out on a trek to the post-office (and hoped the neighbors didn't alert social services about our marching the kids out into the blizzard).

I dug paths for the dog, which she christened copiously --and disgustingly-- minutes after this photo.

I  made snow ice cream sundaes --harvested nowhere near the dog path, mind you.

I watched the girls play in the snow.

I watched them tire of the snow.



And I helped my husband shovel our driveway out from under wet heavy snow that lay higher than my knee.

All of it, to varying degrees, could be classified work, and yet it was the work that I actually get paid to do that remained untouched all day. 

Then, like a gift from the homework gods, they cancelled school for another day. So, naturally, I spent my time downloading pictures and writing this blog...

Play: I am not my shoes

I have always been willing to sacrifice for my footwear.

In college I had a pair of black suede Mary Janes.  They had a slight platform that made them especially cute with little skirts and slick soles that made them dangerously incompatible with my hilly, brick-laned campus.  I first felt their peril in front of the dining hall when my feet flew out from under me and I cracked my shin open on the brick curb just before landing flat on my back --to the amusement of the dinner crowd.  I was wearing those same shoes later that semester, when I left a good-sized chunk of my left knee stuck to a brick walkway on my way back from class.  And still I kept the shoes.  I have scars to this day, but damn did they ever make my legs look skinny.

I have negotiated Parisian cobblestones, eight-hour teaching days and 18 months of pregnancy in pointy-toed high heels.  Late in my pregnancy with Big E, I had to attend an orientation meeting for the natural birth center where I planned to have her.  Just before the meeting, the wool-sweatered, Birkenstock-wearing earth mother in front of me turned, stared at my feet and sniffed to her husband, "I didn't know there would be hospital people here."  When I pushed out a nine-pounder after 24 excruciating hours of drug-free labor, I had half a mind to track down Ms. Flat-Foot Sensible Shoes so I could tell her this: I am not my shoes.

I have spent many a winter morning mincing daintily through snow drifts and parking lot slush all in the interest of arriving at work fashionably shod, and when the girls have managed to drag me out to play in the snow, the best option my shoe wardrobe has offered has been a quick-to-sog pair of old running sneakers.  So this winter, because I'm trying to come to terms with the season and because I've designated play a priority, I came to an uncharacteristic decision: I need a pair of practical, comfortable, weatherproof boots.

The clearance rack at Marshall's tempted me with a heavily-logoed pair of Coach snow boots and a shiny rubber pair with a chunky 2 1/2 inch heel by Kate Spade.  But in my new found spirit of sensible shoes, I opted for a very reasonably priced pair of utilitarian, flat black rubber boots.  They've served me well already: tromping up the sledding hill, strolling through a slushy New Year's Day at the zoo, walking the dog along the shore at the beach.

Still, I am keenly aware that they look like something you'd wear to milk a cow or tour a slaughterhouse.  I try to remind myself that I am sacrificing for a good greater than my own footwear vanity.  I try to imagine that I've slipped them on to stroll through a dewy meadow in the English countryside.  But mostly, I tell myself this:  I am not my shoes.

Dream: Sunshine State of Mind

For reasons I don't fully understand, my husband loves infomercials and home shopping shows.  He has never purchased anything from television but will actually stay up at night to watch a pseudo-documentary on Sounds of the Seventies.  His favorite is the Quacker Factory lady.

If you are unacquainted with her, she is an older lady who seems to have developed a sizeable following hawking bedazzled t-shirts and elastic waist pants.  (Have a look here.)  My husband finds her and her empire hilarious, but for a long time I dismissed her as just another lunatic loudmouth in a whimsical sweater.  Until one day last summer when I learned that she is actually a kindred spirit.

You see, I learned that, like me, Quacker Factory Lady loves palm trees, and, like me, she promised herself that she would one day live in a place where they could grow in her yard.  Sadly, our paths diverge at the point where she actually made this happen for herself, while I am left planning vacations in Orlando and Orange County and dreaming of teaching English in Bali.

My love of palm trees is not so much about the tree itself as it is about what it represents to me.  Palm trees are many things: hot sand, warm breezes, umbrella drinks. Yet, I know that most people with palm trees in their yards must actually go to work, shop for groceries, mop floors, oversee homework, and on and on.  And this doesn't matter, because palm trees are to me, above all, about sun.  They are the anti-winter.

I recently reconnected with a high school friend on Facebook and learned that she had settled in Florida.  She told me that she is a stay-at-home mom and there was mention of a nanny and a black tie gala, photographic evidence of gleaming marble countertops and a backyard pool.  It was not these things that stoked my envy.  It was her declaration that when the temperature dips below 70 they all put on jackets.  This is in stark contrast to me.  Where they have the luxury of bundling up at the hint of a chill, I must persevere and so I've developed a defiantly thick skin. 

The day the clocks fell back was my husband's last soccer game of the season.  It was gray and bitterly cold, and yet I loaded the kids in the car and headed to the game; my only concessions to the chill were some hastily packed hats and mittens and a stop for hot chocolate.  The players on the sidelines bobbed up and down, blew puffs of steam into their cupped hands for warmth, and snuck suspicious glances at the girls and me.  Surely, we looked insane: I wore a vest rather than a full coat and Big E, following my lead, abandoned her jacket after a few minutes.  And as we sat there and I willed the slate gray sky to azure and the biting wind to a balmy breeze, I convinced the girls that we should move to Florida.

By the awkwardness of my husband's squirm when I later told him of my plan, I'm guessing I needn't call the realtor.  But maybe this Christmas he'll get me a little consolation prize...