I am writing this, sitting at coffee shop in midtown Sacramento, sipping some kind of cold, blended coffee concoction, and listening gleefully as the music system plays a whole bunch of songs from the 80’s. It’s like I’ve time-traveled back to high school, except that back then I would never have been caught dead lurking in a coffee shop, and back then I was doing all my writing in spiral-bound five-subject notebooks, scribbling all my stories down by hand. Considering the state of my handwriting (possibly I should have gone into medicine, is what I’m saying here), it’s probably a good thing that eventually I switched over to typing. Much better to be able to read what I wrote when I look back at it later.

This was the first week of my reduced work schedule, and today was my first of several months of every Friday off. So Richard went off to work and I stayed home and kicked off my first ‘furlough Friday’ by curling up under the comforter in bed, with a stack of books and some sleepy kittens and a fresh cup of coffee, and spending several blissful hours doing nothing remotely productive. Lovely!

Ever since I got that notice at work last week I’ve been slowly building up a list of Things To Do, now that I am going to have all this extra spare time. This list includes all kinds of exciting (ha) things, like cleaning the baseboards downstairs, and going outside and yanking out all the old, dead cherry tomato plants and putting in some onions and garlic, or finally getting around to organizing the barely contained disaster zone that is the random storage and yarn closet. So naturally, today, I did not do a single one of those things. Instead, after I polished off two paperbacks and the last of my coffee, I dragged out my recipe folder and lined up the flour and sugar and eggs and my trusty Kitchenaid mixer, and spent the majority of the day having myself a little baking orgy. I made double chocolate chip scones, and dough for pretzels, and one and a half dozen French rolls. I made a pizza with homemade white whole wheat dough and some of the tomato sauce I canned this summer. I took another reading break and worked my way through one more paperback (and people wonder why I take out books from the library a dozen at a time), and then went back into the kitchen and sterilized some jars and lids and canned seven pints of apple butter. And then I finished it all off by whipping up a lasagna, because I have been wanting one for quite some time now, but never had quite enough energy (or time) to get it all together until today.

Nanowrimo update: 18,244 words so far, but I took a break to do a bit of blogging, and I suspect we’ll be here at the coffee shop for another hour or so. I am going to err on the side of optimism and say that while I doubt I will be caught up completely to where I should be, there is a very good chance I could actually break 20,000 words before I go home tonight. We shall see.