Monday, February 27, 2012

What to do on your day off.

Wake up to a cat licking your knuckles. Roll out of bed, stopping mid-roll to rub the doggy belleh presented to you. Start the coffeemaker, then pee.

Check your messages. Notice that your trainer has cancelled your training session for the day. Hope that she doesn't have the violent stomach ailment that's been going around.

Leave the house an hour after waking up, having spent more time than is necessary in the shower with mounds of scented soapsuds and lots of implements. Make your way to Target.

Find that everything you need--boring stuff, like dish soap and lotion--is on sale. Grab a bag of work socks as an impulse buy. Think of how nice it'll be to have a dozen pairs of the same socks.

On the way home, decide to visit the strange little nursery on the edge of town. (NB: One of my few unbreakable life rules is never to shop at a nursery that doesn't have resident cats.)

Roll on into that nursery and greet the Domestic Orange Jumbo who patrols the perimeter. Meander slowly down the rows of trees (Japanese maples are big this year) and hardy annuals until you get to the greenhouse. Push aside the plastic sheeting that covers the door, walk into the greenhouse, and take a deep breath of warm, humid, growing-things-scented air.

Take a few more deep breaths.

Dodging craneflies, examine the offerings. Consider buying four-inch pots of catmint. Discard this idea when you remember how prolific and invasive catmint is. Sniff hard when you bend down to look at the Carolina jessamine and Asian jasmine in teeny pots. Admire the Meyer lemons and wish you could remember to bring such a thing inside when it gets cold.

Walk out of the greenhouse and enjoy the change from warm and humid to cool and slightly muggy.

Walk to the next greenhouse. Stop along the way to pet an argumentative calico cat and a black-and-white cat with long whiskers. Realize that the combination of greenhouse and relative outside humidity has made your hair go native in a big, bushy way.

Enter the second greenhouse. Breathe deeply. Realize that this one is mostly roses, but don't go back out, even though you don't want roses. Stroll the aisles of rose plants, reading every card and smelling every bloom. About halfway through, pick up the calico cat who's followed you in and carry her so she'll stop complaining.

Leave the second greenhouse. Stop to commiserate with the nursery's owner, who thanks you for paying attention to the bitchy calico (now curled up with her head on your shoulder). Discuss the drought, the invasiveness of artemisia, how Home Depot has ruined foundation plantings, and whether you can divide buddelia by whacking at it with a shovel.

On the way home, stop to pick up tacos from the taco truck.

Eat your tacos. Update your blog. Take a nap.

16 comments:

  1. Sounds like such a GREAT day! <3

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  2. Wow! So glad you met the taco truck...definitely my idea of heaven on a day off.

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  3. N. Jean3:34 PM

    What a great day! March in Michigan is pretty drab.

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  4. Sounds like a productive day! I just blogged about loving days off during the week too...can get SO much done!! although i wish we had taco trucks in our area...that would have rocked my Monday!

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  5. I used to stop in at the Oak Park observatory in the dead of winter when I lived near there not so many years ago. There were several rooms, all humid and warm and loamy. Each was a different climatic theme and had benches placed strategically. No cats but exotic birds in cages in the middle room and koi in a meandering pond. Saved my sanity during those cold, gray, interminable Chicago winters.

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  6. Home Depot has ruined foundation plantings[.]

    Wut?

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  7. An excellent day off. The only thing that comes close is the used bookstore day off.

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  8. Sounds like a great way to spend a day.

    Don't know why but I'm fixated on your work socks. Are they dri wicking? Pink? Have "L" on one and "R" on the other like the Nike socks that I scored at a marathon?

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  9. As I read your amazing, *crystalline* writing about your day off, Jo, I could feel myself ............ U.N.T.E.N.S.I.N.G. in the two greenhouses ............ while taking a deep breath; a few more deep breaths; then breathing deeply!!

    Ahhhhhhh ............

    I NEED a day like this before~~~(IF!!)~~~Spring ever gets here!!

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  10. Anonymous5:24 AM

    Hmmm a nap. The best part of a day off.

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  11. Sounds like a great day. Good for you.
    Name that Chicken?... It's a Plymouth Rock Hen! :-)

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  12. Anonymous10:25 AM

    Please don't quit blogging. I'm a nursing student and your words keep me motivated and entertained in an otherwise dimly lit shoe-box of nursing school hell in which I live in. Thank you.

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  13. Anonymous11:12 AM

    Absolutely unrelated to the marvelous day you had... I must take a moment to gush about your blog. I found it a month ago in a fit of shift work insomnia which had me bright eyed at 4 am with not even a hint of sleep creeping in. Your blog is free therapy for me. I appreciate your candor. Thanks for taking the time to tell the interweb about life. It's refreshing to here another nurses nonsense free perspective.

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  14. Love this post and wish you many more days as glorious as that one was.

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  15. joykenn4:22 PM

    Darn you, Jo! Sounds like a fantastic day--restful. Since I was exiled from Texas (for marrying a Yankee I've been condemmed to wander in the wilderness of the cold, cold North. Feb is usually bleak and cold with spring so far in the future that you can't believe it will ever come.

    BUT I've been especially good this year and strangely it is wonderful here in March. I know I've done a bunch of good deeds and been especially nice to the doctors and nurses, etc. so I guess it is solely MY DOINGS that have resulted in 70 degree temperature in mid-March! Praise the powers that be!! A week of fantastic weather. Flowers are blooming, violets have sprouted, the trees are blosoming. I have been REWARDED! (Well, maybe not but..)

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