The much-anticipated night off

So, the much anticipated "night off" came and went. How did I use it? Well...

1. I made dinner. Exciting stuff, I know, but necessary. Most weeknights, dinner consists of something I've cooked some months ago and have reheated for the occasion. This offers the twin benefits of being able to eat home-cooked food almost every night and also not having to spend a long time cooking. Indeed, while doing this I was able to...
   
   
2. I made lunch. Again, not terribly interesting, especially since lunch consists of exactly the same thing as every other weekday, but a necessary task all the same.
   
   
3. TV. I'm told that watching TV shouldn't count as one of my daily tasks, but rather should be something I do to relax. And, indeed, I was somewhat relaxed while watching the night's episode of "True Blood". But, as with so many other things, if I didn't make sure to allocate time for it, it wouldn't get done, and so it gets added to the task list.
   
   
4. Practice. I'm supposed to practice some tunes every night. After all, it is only through doing this that I'll ever get halfway decent at playing them. At the moment, the tunes in question are a hornpipe and two reels for our "Grade 3 Medley" that we're hoping to compete with next year. They're getting a lot better, but they're still rather poor.
   
   
5. Cleaning. The band were out on Tuesday, which meant that I didn't have time to do the week's cleaning then. With the unexpected night free, I took the opportunity to clean the two bedrooms and the Purple Room, those being the rooms next on the cycle. This was another of those dull but necessary tasks; it was really good to get it out of the way, since I'd otherwise have had to do it on Saturday morning.
   
   
6. Reading. Again, this is allegedly not a task, but still needs time allocated to it. I'm now five chapters and an epilogue away from the end of "Towers of Midnight", the penultimate book in the "Wheel of Time" series, which has surprisingly become excellent once again. I'm looking forward to getting that finished this weekend.
   
   
7. Character Creation. In a surprising twist, it looks like the Saturday game is going to be on one last time this weekend. However, it equally turns out that I may have to run an emergency one-shot on Saturday, and that means I need characters. So, yesterday I put together the first of these characters, an old-school Dwarf Fighter named Baredd. More on all of this in a later post.

In truth, items #2, #3, #4 and #6 were things I would probably have done anyway, even had my previous plans not been derailed. Since the original plan included going out for dinner, item #1 would not have been necessary, while items #5 and #7 would have had to wait for another day.

It turned out that the "night off" really wasn't as exciting or useful as it might otherwise have been. Still, it was good to have a bit of time that I could redirect to other things, even if it ended up getting eaten in necessary, rather than fun, things. Besides, time is a zero-sum game - the things I got through yesterday are things that I would otherwise have had to do at some other time; the free time I could have had yesterday is instead turned into more valuable free time at the weekend.

Or something.