April 28, 2002

Welcome to Wyndspirit Dreams! This weekend didn’t go exactly as planned. It was supposed to be a gloomy, raw weekend, and I had planned to stay close to home and work on stuff around the house. However, when I went out to the farm Friday, Mom and I impulsively decided that she would come up for the weekend and we would go shopping. Dad didn’t get it. "What do you need to do up there?" he grumbled to Mom. And when I brought her back to the farm today, he gave a little grin and said, "Three hundred miles." When I looked blank, he said, "You put three hundred miles on the car. It’s fifty miles each way."

"So?" I said. "That’s what cars are for!" Then it was his turn to look blank, totally unable to comprehend that I had just put three hundred miles on my car for no particular reason, and I didn’t even care! I don’t think he ever did get it. Sometimes you get to a point when you just have to do something, something totally useless, something just for yourself, no matter how many projects are piling up, no matter what you should be doing. Mom needed to escape, to get out of the house. And I was thoroughly sick of my own company and in desperate need of distraction from my own stressors. So, Saturday afternoon I went out to the farm just to pick up Mom so we could go shopping.

The weather was as raw and rainy as had been predicted, but we didn’t really mind. We didn’t do very much shopping—neither of us had money to spare or a major shopping list. We didn’t even eat out. We window shopped around Wal-Mart, then got groceries and went back to my place. Mom read my magazines and I scanned some things on the computer that she had wanted. We listened to music, munched on buttery popcorn, and visited till the wee hours of the morning. We were still up bright and early Sunday morning, refreshed despite the short night. We visited some more and played with the cats, then finally hung a picture and planted half a dozen tiger lilies so we could say we had done something useful over the weekend. Then we went back to the farm.

I visited at the farm for a bit, then came home to face all the stuff I didn’t get done this weekend. And then I wasted the rest of the evening playing on the computer. And I do mean playing—not working on any of the projects that really needed to be done, but Instant Messaging with a friend all evening, not doing a single thing useful. Tomorrow I will go back to work, having accomplished not one thing on my "to do" list. However, I will face the week in a happier, more relaxed frame of mind than I have been in ages. Now that I think about it… I don’t believe this was an unproductive, wasted weekend at all!