Leisure days

Switching back and forth between work and home has been...unenviable. After about a day at home, I hate to leave. The farm is quiet, expansive, everything is growing--the garden needs some more weeding--and I like knowing what the weather is just by taking two steps out the door. In town, houses and roads break the great outdoors into tiny bits. Even once I go outside, it's still like peering through a keyhole.

And then I spend a day in town, and coming home to collapsed sheds and weeds and cows just scraping by on our scant pasture is depressing as all get out. So. I start school in two and a half weeks, which will spell the end of all my current lifestyle quandaries. I'll have new ones instead! Like, are my boyfriend and I actually compatible in the same apartment? And will I be around enough for it to matter?

I worked out an allocation of my hours for a typical week. Start with 168 hours in a week. Take out 56 for sleeping (8 hours a night) and 50 for the time I'm in classes or labs. That leaves me with 62 hours. Going with the 2-5 hours study time per 1 hour class time (class, no labs, equals about 25 hours a week), means that I need to spend a minimum of 50 hours a week studying. There's not enough time in the week for a higher average than 2.5 hours per class. Scary. As it is, I maybe get an hour a day to eat, travel, exercise, and maintain cordial relations with Mr. Roommate. And maybe an extra hour off on Saturday for good behavior. I know--I'll go grocery shopping!

Needless to say, my real schedule will be far more chaotic and haphazard. But I am looking forward to it, even while I'm fully appreciating my current leisure.

I'm gonna miss my dog, I know. I wish I could take him to school with me, but this is out of the question because: 1. He is a psychotic border collie with no house training. And 2. My apartment doesn't let me keep dogs anyway. Too bad in some ways--according to past vet students, pets are great for studying anatomy on a live animal. Ah, well. Perhaps I can schedule in regular visits to home if I count them as study time for anatomy.

But currently on the schedule: leisure time, so long as "leisure" includes things like weeding the squash, yelling at the dogs when they transgress the garden boundaries, moving fences, moving cows, cleaning kennels, and, this afternoon, shopping for school supplies with my mom! And eating equal quantities of watermelon and zucchini brownies. And cherry tomatoes. Nothing in the world is quite as awesome as fresh garden tomatoes. They're like steak with seeds. Juicy, savory, a little sweet.

I can hear the chickens squawking. Probably time to go yell at the dogs again. The sheer number of chicks seems to have bewildered them out of catching any, but they still try.

Hmm, can't hear the hawk today, though. There's a young hawk living in one of the oaks, who likes to fly the air currents and yells the whole time. From dawn to dark, you can hear him: "Eee! Eee! Mom, lookitme, I'm flying!"