Hi. I'm rj and I'm a workaholic
I took a day off today. I don't feel bad about it. Really. I don't. I promise. Today's work hiatus wasn't entirely voluntary; The Wife took Champion Dog 2 down to the South Edge for a show. Brought home ribbons, a fairly nice paperweight and winnings of $4.50. More importantly, folks who know about dogs were impressed with her dog. This, I'm told, is very, very good.

And anyway, when the war starts (not "if," Mr. President, "when"; you don't fool me), I won't be putting the words "day" and "off" together in any sentence for a while. So I went against my nature and enjoyed the semi-break I gave myself from working today. Here was my 6-step program (hey, remember, it's a day off; I'm allowed to half-ass if I want to):

1/Baseball with The Boy. He's in a league for kids born after Jan. 1, 1999. Any resemblance it bears to actual baseball is purely coincidental. But it's a lot of fun for all involved, so far. If I see any Little League nightmare parents in this, I know the apocalypse is near. We have a "game" Saturday. Today's lesson: Holding on to the bat when swinging it.
2/Reading with the Young Daughter. I start the sentence, she finishes it. From memory, of course.
3/Installing a garbage disposal. By myself. This is a fairly dramatic feat. I'm not what you'd call "good around the house." Nor do I have any particular desire to be. But ... well, let's just say much hinged on getting the old dead disposal out and the new good one in. So I'm addicted to my modern conveniences. Make fun of me.
4/Buying a new coffee maker. My coffee maker is one of the most important appliances in the house. It'd probably be high on the list of things I'd grab from a fire. It was more of an inconvenience to be without a coffee maker than it was to be without a garbage disposal. I got one of these black-and-chrome jobs just because I thought it looked cool. Plus, it promises to keep the coffee warm for four hours without a hot surface. (One of these "thermal" things.) Anyway, when The Wife saw it tonight, she said, "You did notice that we have no other black appliances anywhere in the house?" Yeah, I did notice, after I got the thing home and out of the box. Oh well.
5/Taking the kids to a drive-in hamburger joint. One, because I was too lazy to cook (despite having a newly clean kitchen) and two, because this particular drive-in joint is for some weird reason one of their favorite places. We had one close to our house in Texas. The Old Daughter asked a few weeks ago if there was a location in Florida. We said no. Turns out there is, which was a cool surprise for the kids.
6/Doing some work. See, you say, you're no recovering workaholic. You're using again. Well, yeah, OK. But I had some stuff I need to do, and for a while, I had the perfect environment in which to do it: The aforementioned kick-ass Mac laptop; a completely dark, quiet room, instead of the usual chaotic atmosphere at the office; and a cold beer at my fingertips, rather than bad vending-machine coffee.

If one must work -- and I must -- that's the way to do it.