Slacking Off

Snow+Vacation Day+Me being a Sloth at Heart=Today.

I am in complete and total slacker mode. I didn't do any laundry, or tabulate my bank accounts(which I normally do every paycheck and have been paid twice, so I've had financial papers piling up for a month now), or anything else all that productive today. With the blizzard, I expected to sleep late, so I stayed up without any regard for potential responsibility. I surfed. I watched DVDs. I played games. I stayed up until almost 4AM solving The Dark Room. It took me almost an hour to finish and at one point I had to actually get a pen and paper and draw diagrams, but I made it in to their Hall of Fame(#5508). I love these thinker games. Speaking of games, be sure to check out the new game section at The Bible Archive. I wasted a(n) (un)healthy amount of time there today.

With the snow, we weren't going to be making it out to church, so I foolishly, perhaps even sinfully, expected to sleep in. Around 10AM I have a vague recollection of my dad asking if I wanted to shovel snow early before it got too cold, and to make room in the driveway for his friend's son-in-law to come by and plow. I remember mumbling an annoyed “Cn I hv bkfst fst?!” in to my pillow and the sound of the door closing. The next sound I heard was our screen door, followed by the scrape of a shovel. The impatient old guy was out there. I got up and saw a half hour had slipped by, and raced to help him before he had a heart attack. Downstairs I had trouble slipping in to an old pair of boots, and found a sock in one of them. My mom later confirm its mate had been in the “orphan sock” drawer, probably since last winter. So I have another pair of socks now, the high point of this uneventful day.

We cleaned off the cars and shoveled the top half of the driveway, and pulled them up as far as they would go. The lower half would be left for the plow, which we weren't even sure was coming. We did the front walk for the mailman and a path to the mailbox from the house for ourselves, and to his credit my dad went in after that. I stayed out a while longer knowing that if the plow didn't come, he'd be back out later despite saying it could wait until tomorrow since I had off. I also feel kind of guilty when we get plowed out, like I can't take care of my own parents and this guy needs to bail me out. I know it's not like that; his father-in-law, who passed away a few years ago, was one of my dad's best friends, and my dad helped their family out a lot with automotive problems, often without charge. So they're just returning the favor, but I still feel the need to do my part.

Finally I was on the verge of collapse myself, but little enough remained that if the plow didn't show, we could take care of it after some rest. I came inside and had breakfast, and immediately resumed slacker mode. I watched I, Robot again in its entirety. Very cool movie, but then I love anything with robots so I'm biased. A few days ago I mentioned I'd write a robots post, but that's not happening; I'm just not focused today. Perhaps tomorrow I'll be more productive and do something other than surfing and watching a rerun of Angel, then going back to sleep for a few hours until dinner.

Whoa. Just now when I went to look up the link for Angel, a headline caught my eye and actually made me gasp out loud. Johnny Carson died. I liked Johnny, and missed his presence in the public eye these last thirteen(!) years. Hopefully his absence from the spotlight meant that he enjoyed the last few years of his life, and wasn't battling some illness. He completely became a private citizen, and even the details of his death have yet to be divulged to the public. Definitely going to miss him.