I came in from work, ran out to check over a presentation about a power line running past the church (and quite a few other places), and came back to Nobody Home. No jabbering TV, nobody Going To Die if I didn’t drop everything and fix her problem right away... sweeeet. I spent some time weeding down my inbox (now less than 100 messages from over 500 on Saturday) and catching up on some other folks’s blogs.
Digression, or maybe not: On the way home from work, I picked up a copy of Getting Things Done — it comes highly recommended in certain Mac geek circles — and made a short start of it. From the summary I saw at 43folders.com, it looks like a Master Plan for actually making Lotus Notes useful... which is a miracle that I’ve got to see for myself. I did manage, over the last couple of days, to whittle the couple-hundred messages out of my Notes inbox at work down to five (on Friday) and then to three (today). Next step is to wade through my project folders, clear out obsolete stuff, and move anything important into the Todo list.
An essential ingredient of Peace and Quiet is the lack of annoyance. Fortunately, there are few things harder to notice than something that is not annoying you. If that itch under my left shoulder blade isn’t itching, I don’t think about it. Upon finding the Monday morning meeting was cancelled (hooray!), I promptly forgot about it and did useful things all morning. I’m the kind of person who usually isn’t annoyed by low-level clutter, so I usually don’t notice it. (This is the source of some friction at FAR Manor, as Mrs. Fetched is annoyed by clutter... but often not enough to actually do something about it herself.) On the other hand, the TV is annoying, or at least distracting, so I tend to hike the iBook away from the living room and play music through a pair of earbuds.
There’s a drawback to forgetting about annoyances, though: when they come back, even when you know they’re coming back, their presence makes them twice as annoying... at least at first. I’m thinking about school buses — after the first week of summer vacation, I stop rejoicing in their absence and forget about them for the next two months (Two months? What happened to three months? This slow erosion of summer is ridiculous!).
Slumber calleth, so off to bed I go. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my work at home days, so I won’t be thinking about commuting tomorrow either.
Ah slackdom is bliss on earth.
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