My Random Day Off

I have too much vacation.

I’ll wait a moment while you sympathize with me…… That should do it! Now, back to business!

Basically, I didn’t take a lot of vacation early this year because I was busy at work on a project. Now, as the year draws to a close, I have found that I have a relatively large amount of days left that I have to take off. It may seem like I’m saying this just to rub in my good fortune, and while that’s true, what’s interesting is that I don’t have specific plans for all of these vacation days.

So I took Friday off and it was probably the first day I’ve ever taken that didn’t involve me leaving Wisconsin for less cheesy pastures. So, you may be asking, what happens on a random day off for me?

First, I wake up very early to go out picture taking in the rain. The premise here is that if everybody is at work they couldn’t possibly be bumbling around in the parks and annoying me while I take pictures of raindrops:

It was pretty windy and I had high hopes of catching a flurry of leaves in mid flight after they had detached themselves from their respective trees. However, the best I could do was this one lonely, leaf:

It turns out that I’m rather fond of that leaf. He was the only one that went along with my plan. From here on out I’ll refer to him as Lief. (Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

After that I tried to amuse myself by watching Transformers 2. It was truly horrible. After I watched for a half-hour I realized that there was still about seventeen hours left. At this point I found out that I could watch the movie at 2 or 4 times the regular speed and still follow what was happening. (Robots were pounding on each other like crazy.) Then I moved on to skipping scenes until I got to the climatic finale, where the robots pounded on each other like crazy. Finally the movie ended and, feeling dumber than when I had started, I decided to read instead.

Eventually the day began to draw to a close. I headed out again for more pictures. (I’m desperately trying to enjoy Fall as much as possible before the snow flies.)

Once the sunset had faded I relaxed on the bank for a while, listened to the wind, smelled the leaves, and generally let my mind wander wherever it wanted to. It was very relaxing. I really need to do that more.

Then I went home and the power went out.