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Status update for my first week of being on leave from day job:

• Feeling a little more relaxed already.
• Getting more sleep than usual, though that may be related to going to sleep earlier than usual.
• I made a list of things to do every day—some of them are ongoing long-term open-ended things, like piano practice and Duolingo and walking on the elliptical, while others are make-small-progress-on-relatively-short-term-projects things, like labeling at least 10 unlabeled photos a day, and reading at least one story from a Year’s Best volume a day. So far, I’ve been doing most of the things on the list most days, and not stressing much about it if I miss a couple of them on a given day.
• Other reading has included Le Guin stories (in chronological order by publication year; currently reading stories published in 1990), and Jane Rice stories (so far, disappointed to find that they’re fairly standard horror, but hoping for more variety as the book goes on), and Mencken’s The American Language (haven’t gotten very far in it yet), and a couple of other things.
• Transferred a hundred open tabs from my iPhone and iPad to my text file of links-to-deal-with; am posting a few of those a day too.
• Watched a bunch of TV the other day with Kam, though we’re not yet caught up on some shows. Shows we’re currently watching: Ted Lasso; What If…?; Westworld (about to start season 3); Y: The Last Man; Foundation; and Motherland: Fort Salem.
• Went grocery shopping for the first time in a couple months—I had been using Instacart, but they’re again/still treating workers badly.
• I have several other errands to run, probably today—flu shot, blood test, getting glasses fixed, maybe picking up my stuff from the office.
• Making progress toward getting house in shape to be cleaned by cleaners next week. For example, I recently broke down a large number of cardboard boxes, and cleaned the couple dozen to-be-recycled plastic containers that I had accumulated in the kitchen sink, and washed the pots and pans that had been languishing nearby. Still need to get various other clutter off of various floors and tables and other horizontal surfaces to make them cleanable, but that should be manageable. (Thanks to Sumana and KTO for remote company during the clutter management.)
• Kam arranged for someone to come and power-wash my backyard furniture, which I expect will make it pleasantly usable for the first time in a few years.
• Made a little bit of progress on the authors-of-color database project for the SLF, but haven’t really settled into working on that yet.
• Spent a while transcribing an 1825 game/book, Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos, for Words & Stuff. And then a while longer poking at CSS to remove extraneous drop caps from that post.
• Oddly, I’ve spent less time this week playing iOS puzzle games than I did over the previous couple of weeks. I think I was using that as a distraction during breaks from tasks that I didn’t really want to do or was feeling stressed about. (But also the novelty of the particular game I’ve been playing, Loopy (also known as Slitherlink), has worn off a bit. I still like it a lot, though. (I play the hexagon/honeycomb variant.) Thanks to KTO for pointing me to the Simon Tatham puzzle games.)
• I still have plenty of other projects and tasks that I hope/plan to do over the next couple months but haven’t started yet. But I’m making good progress on the above-listed things so far. And almost none of the things on my to-do-on-leave list are really important to get done during this time off; it wouldn’t be disastrous if I spent the whole time lounging about.