Sunday, March 10, 2002 |
16:25 - Another lazy Sunday...
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This is the first weekend in a while when I've been able to just sit and do nothing. So that's exactly what I'm doing.
Of course, even when there's nothing at all to do on a weekend like this, I still find it really difficult to just lie around and accomplish nothing. So while I've ostensibly never really left my room since Friday night, I've taken in about eight movies on cable, dug through a mountain of paper detritus that had piled up in my room, caught up all my backed-up e-mail, gone through the past four weeks' worth of newsgroups, fixed two or three long-standing and niggling bugs in the server code, and started dabbling in animation. It's that first big step-- drawing the first few sequential frames-- that's the big barrier; beyond that, it all seems much easier. A shallow learning curve that begins at 10,000 feet.
And yet it's now getting towards the end of the afternoon on Sunday, and it's gorgeous outside-- a sure-fire recipe for me to feel like I've just lost a precious weekend, never to be recovered, so much time not taken advantage of. I don't know what I'd hoped to do rather than sit inside and get caught up on stuff, but it feels so tangible that I can't even consider ignoring it.
Since the rest of the household has gone onto the Atkins Diet (all the red meat and grease you want, just no carbohydrates-- and bloody hell, it works), I'm having to adjust my eating habits to match. It feels weird being the odd man out who can eat potatoes or rice or pasta or bread, and so I always end up with far too much food-- the Meat Diet portion plus the carbos. It sounds good, I know, but if you want to come help out I'll be happy to get two or three volunteers.
Ah well. My hands are healing nicely, and so I think we'll all be ready for another ski excursion next weekend. It's just finished snowing up at Sierra-at-Tahoe, the conditions are great right now, and there's word of more snow coming this week-- so the conditions this time should be everything that this past trip wasn't: Powdery, fresh, cold, exhilarating. The way it was a couple of winters ago when I went up solo. That weekend in Carson City was one of those adventures I'll always enjoy remembering. Seeing a movie in a strange town (American Beauty, it was), getting asked for a light by kids outside the theater-- ahh, Nevada. Eating at Round Table at the edge of town, reaffirming just how good Round Table pizza tastes after a day on the slopes. Reading Spellsinger over my pizza, getting so furious with the ineptitude and outlandishness of the writing that I very nearly hurled the book across the room into some kid's birthday party. Putting chains on for $20 at the base of Highway 50's incline up into the Tahoe area. Driving through South Lake Tahoe during a white-out, where even the mountains behind the town were invisible. Getting stopped in traffic (the turn-off-your-engine kind of stop) while they cleared a spinout, and getting in a snowball fight with the cars in front of me and behind me, using the big piles of snow on the tops of our cars as ammo.
Yes, that weekend I didn't feel as though I'd wasted it on something frivolous. Because it resulted in memories; and while this weekend did involve some pretty fair accomplishments, I won't remember a thing about it a month from now.
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