This has been a winter of discontent. As I sit here and write this, I’ve already received the call from my district that we won’t be open tomorrow. A fourth nor’easter is forecasted to drop anywhere from 4-15 inches of snow on Long Island tomorrow. No joke, that’s what I read on an news alert shortly after I woke up this morning! The last two storms that came through were slightly misforecast in regards to snowfall, so I suspect the weather forecasters are playing it safe with this one. Give a big range and hope for accuracy.
I don’t mind having the unexpected day off. Honestly, it’s an opportunity for me to do some deep work on my class assignments, which (for the most part) I’ve been completing a little at a time on weeknights when I come home from work. That’s not really the optimal time for me to do anything that requires such focus, as I’m usually pretty shot from the day.
Days off, for snow or otherwise, were in short supply this fall and winter. Most Saturdays included back-to-back classes running from 8am until around 4:30pm, and many of my Sundays were devoted to judging cheerleading competitions here on Long Island. With cheer season ending in mid-February, I’ve been trying to get used to having a weekend day off again, and the ironic “abundance” of free time was a little weird for me. While I so badly wanted to use the days to load around my house in sweatpants and binge-watch Netflix all day, I felt almost guilted into doing “productive” things – laundy, grocery shopping, house cleaning, and the occasional social event. Rarely were chunks of time on those days allotted for the kind of deep work needed for reading chapters of complex doctoral texts filled with the vocabulary of the dissertation process.
But a snow day is a blessed “bonus” day. Since I used this past Sunday for errands, I can devote plenty of time (presumably with plenty of night-before sleep) for deep work.
And that’s what I’ll do. I’ll give myself a few hours in the morning to get some obligatory things done. Hopefully I’ll even get to the gym. After that… deep work.
Did you notice that this blog post is basically a pep talk for myself. Well, yeah… that’s what it is. Because no matter how I much effort I make into making plans for using my time tomorrow, who knows if I’ll succumb to the pressure of enjoying a snow day for what it should be: sweatpants and binge-watching Netflix.
Inside the Launch Window 