Day off (or off day)

Where I work, the office closes down on the afternoon of Good Friday. I haven't exactly been feeling 100% since about Tuesday morning, so I arranged with my boss to take off the entire day and get some extra rest. I did sleep in and loaf around a good portion of the day - but taking the day off doesn't necessarily have the result you might expect when you're a supervisor. That, combined with my damnable inclination toward productivity, combined to wreak havok on a day that should been filled with sleep and devoid of expectation.

It started this wasy: Sometime during the last 24 hours, I learned that Jackson Browne would be performing at a local venue on July 27th - and that tickets would go on-sale at 10 am this morning. So, right away, I start formulating goals and expectations. I'm gonna coordinate with friends who I think will want to see the show and get us some good seats. It took three phone calls, three emails, one Internet snafu, plus one hundred and eighty-five American dollars to get me four tickets to the show. I normally would be pleased with such an industrious start to the day - but the bitter taste of "coulda-shoulda" was in my mouth. The aforementioned "Internet snafu" left me with four seats in Row W - instead of the ones in Row K that I was intially offered by Mr. TicketMaster. I got over it - but, in some ways, the theme for the day was set:
It's not going to be everything you hoped for.

I started to make some updates in my accounting software and paid some bills on-line (I'm two months behind in balancing accounts and I need to get caught up this weekend). After a while, I was thinking that I should stop fooling around on the computer and get in some quality time on the tread mill. Then I started to get hungry. I decided I didn't want to eat until after 3 pm - and I didn't want to work out on an empty stomach when I wasn't feeling my best - so I took a shower.*

When I got out of the shower, The Boy (often referred to as 17-year-old Boy by MAW) asked if I would give him money to go golfing with his BFF this afternoon. Having seen his latest report card earlier in the day, I was not so inclined** (although later I did spring for him to have a late lunch/early dinner with his bud). And a few minutes later I started getting pages on my BlackBerry which, eventually, metamorphasized into phone calls regarding a network outage affecting our company's spam filtering service. That outage had cut off our flow of email to and from the Internet. (Good Lord! Is anyone still reading or listening to this drivel?! I'm not sure I'm even interested - and I lived it!)

OK - so here's the point: I took the day off work - but didn't escape work. Both my "real job" (the stuff I get paid to do) and my self-imposed to-do list (balance the check book, exercise, work on my blog, etc) were nagging at me most of the day.

The moral to the story?
It wasn't my boss I needed to ask for time off -
I needed to give myself permission.
As Ron White would say:
"That's a handy piece of information to have, right there."

Take care.


*Which may end up being the highlight of my day.
**The most disappointing thing is: I know he's just not trying very hard in some classes.