Night off, a student's paradise

Getting toward the season where my non-student friends start rolling their eyes and making snarky comments about not being "so dam serious" about school -- finals are coming around. Hanging out with non-students this time of year can be taxing. It's like sports fans dealing with non-sport derision during the playoffs, or new parents getting asked out for beers by their non-parent friends who just don't get the fact that there is a toddler involved. Somehow, I think a lot of adults got all the way through school and never lost the attitude of "oh it's just school, who cares." No reasonable person would encourage their friends to blow off work deadlines when they have a performance review coming up -- but I still get this kind of flack from otherwise perfectly reasonable adults regarding my schoolwork.

To start off the finals season, I took a night off. I got off school, dropped my backpack on the living room floor and didn't think about it or academia again the whole night through. I didn't do my normal routine of a little cleaning and housework or bill paying , a snack, and probably a nap before leaving again in a few hours to go study til the wee hours of the morning with The Crew. Instead, I walked down the street and hung out with the neighbors as they were building a stone retaining wall, walked the garden a bit and talked to T. about the goings-on there, stared at flowers and bees in the yard for exceedingly long periods of time, shuffled uselessly around the house a bit, and hit the sack early. Actually got to lounge around and chat about nothing in particular with The Wife as well. At this point in the school year, that's a description of heaven for me.

I don't need to be casting over a nice hatch of Pale Morning Duns off a gravel bar on the lower Deschutes, or hunting spring Morels on the slopes of the Cascade range -- just hanging out around our wonderful house works for me. It's a sanctuary for us -- a colorful sanctuary full of books and good food, and beautiful art. A place where we can put up road-weary friends and keep the cats in a matter to which they are accustomed. A little urban oasis surrounded on all sides by flowers, trees and veggies. It pays back in spades the work we put into it.

Now that I mention it, some fly-fishing and knocking-about in the woods would be quite fantastic too. Note to self: get the hell out of dodge this summer as much as humanly possible before school starts up again.