A 9-5 workday for once

I feel I haven’t done much today, and yet I must have, for when it came 4:20 and I sat down in the living room with a Tofutti Cutie (on sale at Raleys this week!) to look out at the deck garden and have my last break of the day, I felt a deep sense of well-being such as only comes from having no anxiety about my work. Not that I only get this when I’ve been working well; I also feel this way when I’m on vacation, or it’s a weekend, when I’ve decided not to think about my work at all!

Here’s what I have done: Morning Pages, cut and chopped every last bit of the enormous pile of magazine pages I tore out almost a week ago, sorted and put those away, reorganized my drawing-practice file, registered for Jeff’s portrait-drawing class and am curiously excited about this even after vowing last night never to sign up for another class in this time slot, reread with great relish (perhaps because guilty pleasure) some of Ballet Shoes over lunch, taken regular breaks, caught myself up on writing about Virginia Woolf’s diary, read two more years in the diary and then wrote on those, produced in my diary-musing a determination to try out writing sometime that reflects more accurately the passage of thoughts and life, rather than traditional straight narrative, and began a “young authors’ faire” story using my idea for a Narnia-esque story about a boy who finds hidden worlds in his uncle’s house. I’ve written a page of text (three or four pages of story, and perhaps many more if I turn this into a graphic novel instead of a short book), and it’s been fun. I want to continue but I’m tired and hungry.

This was the first day I attempted a 9-5 (in this case, 9:30-5:30) work day, and I must say it’s paid off very handsomely and wasn’t an ordeal at all — though that’s because I’m also decently caught up on dishwashing, ate healthily yesterday, and exercised for the past two days. I do itch a little to do non-worky things like scanning more photos, but I must say honestly I think I’ll be too tired after 5:30 to do much of that. Erik and I have agreed on a ramble for later so there’ll be that, and perhaps after that just bed. It’ll be a busy day of well-filling tomorrow (and I must do a bit of planning for it later) so I have that to look forward to.