Day Off

In my line of work, we get one day off every 10 days, maximum. Sometimes its every seven. (But we can go up to ten without penalty.) Not two days per five day week. We also tend to work about 60 hours a week when in rehearsal. Thusly, the day off is a day to recharge, relax... and get a lot of mundane things done.

Today's mundane list:
-get new MacBook Pro battery for free because it was faulty to begin with and I just found out about the exchange
-do laundry
-clean kitchen/bathroom/living area/bedroom
-run the dishwasher
-cook
-prep snacks for work
-put things away/hang things up so I don't feel like a slob
-enter receipts into Quicken, figure out what bills are due when/how much

That's the stuff that HAD to get done today. The battery could have waited probably, but since the computer just returned with a new logic board (that's a new brain, right?), why not have an almost new computer? So far so good with the "new" computer, but I haven't really run it through its paces.

But it was also important to me to 'get out of town' today. Technically, the Mercer Arboretum is not quite outside of Houston, but its a decent drive away from the usual area that I run errands/hang out in.

I have been hoping for a beautiful day on my day off and I succeeded. The rain was kept at bay and the weather was only mildly sticky.

I took almost 600 pictures today. That's a lot, you think, right? It is. But you have to understand that a good 400 of them were attempts at getting just a handful of good pictures: bees and flowers. Ever since my lucky catch, I've been questing to repeat that. Bees are not easy subjects to catch and did I mention that I'm actually afraid of them?

Out of the 600 pictures taken today, I've only kept 170. And there's still more filtering to be done. I've gotten rid of all the out-of-focus ones, repeats, etc.

A "highlights" selection can be found here, but I'll post my favorites now:







Last time, I saw snakes and butterflies. This time, I saw four different types of lizards. One of them was too fleet-footed to catch on camera, he had a yellow-ish body and a blue tail. Too bad.

Not everything on that to-do list is done, but now that I've uploaded my pictures, it's time to fold laundry and finish the rest of my to-do list.