The Oasis

What a fantastic day. It's been a weird week. I was making great headway at work and then Lori and Ben got sick and I ended up staying home Thursday and Friday. I still managed to work, and perhaps it helped me to get even more caught up. But then late Friday I ended up having to go in for a meeting. A meeting that was probably barely 5 minutes. This is the second week in a row where I've got back into the office on a day when I wasn't in the office (the previous week I was on vacation) and the meeting was delayed because of a previous meeting that ran long. Last week, though, I was still given an hour. Yesterday, I was probably barely given five minutes. Because Lori was sick, we didn't have small groups last night.

And because Lori was sick, I took Rachel to her swimming lesson this morning.

That was nice and relaxing just hanging out on the bleachers while Rachel did her thing, but it set in motion a non-standard Saturday. I didn't leap from bed and start doing chores. And by the time we were done at the pool, I had other errands to run. So I set out... I stopped at nine places (I got the Overshare badge on Foursquare.)

At the first stop, I started up RunKeeper. Each time I'd get back in the car, I'd pause it. All told, I didn't walk quite 3 miles, but it was quite a bit of unplanned walking. And I bought shoes, visited two stores I had never been to before (Sportsman's Warehouse and Menchie's), went to Home Depot and that other home decor website. It was a nice afternoon. Menchie's was a pleasant surprise. I've heard them talk about it at work and sure enough, Erin is the mayor (she and I have been battling for mayor of World Vision). When I went in, they greeted me, determined that it was my first visit and told me how it worked and then I mentioned that my coworkers go there all the time and she asked where I worked and when I told her, she said if I had my ID badge, I got 20% off. Score.

So I had healthy non-fat cappucino frozen yogurt with a few vanilla wafers on top as a reward for myself for getting to "normal" for the first time ever on the Wii Fit.

Then back home, lots of lawn mowing. Realized that I can either mow the lawn or work on the yard. Since the yard needs work, obviously, need less lawn. I made a mistake - I sprayed Round-Up all over a bunch of lawn, but then never put weedblock on top, so weeds all grew back, means I gotta do it again. And that stuff is expensive.

Anyhow, yeah, then tonight, despite the cold (48), I did end up going running.

While I was seeing a few emails come and go for work, I mostly didn't think about work today. And I completely forgot about something interesting that's going on at work that's been keeping me preoccuped lately. Which just seems weird - means that I really did manage to disconnect and find an oasis.

And the nice thing -- there's still another day this weekend.