The Weekend Sofa Warrior
Every weekend I relax and get super productive…sort of…
7:50 p.m.: Where is my husband? He vanished into the depths of bi-weekly “Guy’s…Sunday Afternoon?” 8 hours ago.
Coffee Consumption: Nope. Not admitting that today. I’ve got a new book I want to stay up late and read. Leave it at that.
Music: Did you know dogs snore? Loudly?
The Canines: Snoring louder than my son and my husband combined, and they are LOUD.
The Omen: About to walk in the front door and ruin my Zen which is a good thing for once. He’s cooking dinner and I’m starving.
Leading Man #1: Home in Trenton, NJ, having dinner. He just called.
Littleton, MA
Every Friday evening, I plan all of the great things I am going to do over the weekend. I’m going to write that second children’s story. Write down the story I told my niece over the phone last week. Research those magazines listed in the Writer’s Market that fit my genre. At the very least I’m going to work on one of the three quilts I have in various stages laying about the dining room (not enough room in my home office for them).
Seriously. I need to finish those quilts. They’re custom sized to so I don’t have to fight 2, 32” long neck-to-tail, 24” tall shoulder-to-floor canines for blankets or wake up in the middle of the night freezing because only ¼ of my body is covered.
Every weekend I end up perched in a corner of the curved, burgundy leather sectional sofa streaming some show my husband has no interest in watching with me and chilling with the dogs.
Never fails.
Proving my point, Leading Canine #1 by adoption and coincidentally birth order, aka Rocky, sits up on the opposite end of the sofa, walks over his sisfur napping dead center of it, and curls up in my lap, leaning into my chest. A moment later, realizing I am undeterred with my laptop, he stands up, wanders around a bit, refuses several invitations to rejoin me after I close the laptop, and finally settles in front of me on the floor.
Ella, Leading Canine #2, watching this from her perch on the sofa, does the dog equivalent of rolling her eyes at her brother.
The house returns to silence – I’ve just finished bingeing The Crown and have nothing else I want to watch today until hubster gets home – and I reopen my laptop.
The Dell Inspiron became a fixture in my bag of Cris’ Craft Cr*p (actual name) next to the sofa about 6 months ago, which is when, after over a year of the same routine: plan to do all the stuff I need to get done on Friday, end up sitting on the couch with the dogs on Saturday and Sunday afternoon – I finally admitted to myself I had no intentions of sitting in front of the desktop computer in my home office on the weekends.
It’s not that I’ve got office fatigue and have no desire to get near a computer at all on the weekends. My home office, and my home office routine, are designed to prevent that. My home office is my haven. My craft supplies are there. My 3 sewing machines are there. My sewing table with the large wooden drawers crammed with fabric are there. The walls are a dark green. Sunlight filters through butter-colored solar roller shades and ultra-light yellow sheers. Plants, books – including a selection I’ve edited or that were written by clients – are on the shelves. My writing and crafting reference collections are there with them.
When I step into my home office, my soul eases just a little bit.
Some of it is the dogs. Saturday and Sunday late mornings on the couch with HooMom are part of their routine. Rocky developed anxiety reactivity during the COVID-19 shutdown. A set routine of events occurring in the same order and at the same general time of day on the same days makes him feel more at ease and is an essential part of his training.
Pause, let the dogs out. Groan as I hear them bark at something they can’t see, but can hear or smell on the other side of the fenced in back yard.
I bring my laptop into the three-season room and sit with it on the patio love seat to keep an eye on them. A blast of cold air hits me and I hope they don’t stay out there too long.
They don’t, dubiously fortunately. I get to come in from the cold but my writing is interrupted again. I am 100% convinced dogs – at least my guys anyway – are genetically engineered to thwart writer’s attempt at actually writing anything.
Worse than husbands. The moment The Omen gets home, my writing time will be all over.
Unless my son FaceTime’s first.
Hey guys! Do you want me to be on the Barnes’ best seller list or not?
The silence, broken only by Ella’s licking her paw, is all the answer I need.
Also, I’m not aiming for a best selling novel. I know what I’m good at. It’s not long-form adult fiction.
No, my inability to move a 95lb all-muscle boxer who thinks he’s a lapdog off my chest once he’s settled there isn’t the reason I never seem to achieve my lofty weekend goals, or at least, it’s not the only one. I’ve learned to slow down and filter what has to be done and what can wait over the last year.
Most of the stuff I plan to do over the weekend falls into the latter category. I need to run a dust rag, bathe the dogs (which they just love, by the way. I mean that sarcastically), occasionally scrub a bathroom. I want to work on that quilt, the t-shirt iron on I cut on my Cricut after work one day, and folding the laundry, which I can do during the week.
I want to be a weekend warrior. I need to slow down and breathe. My career industry – proposal development – has a high rate of burnout. The hours are long. The deadlines are tight. The adrenaline rush is fantastic. I believe in my company’s mission and vision. I want to keep feeling that sore muscle except it’s my brain feeling I get when I’ve just finished an intense workday. I want my fingers to keep typing 60 words per minute (down from 66, carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis are pains in my arse).
I want to keep doing what I love doing.
I want to not be a starving writer.
So weekends, with the dogs, on the couch.
Watching TV and trying not to suffocate from the Rock sitting on my chest isn’t all I do while sitting here. This isn’t a matter of that weird “She wanted to and she knew she could but she was tired so she didn’t” or its “It’s okay not to have a focus or a calling you can just do a bunch of different stuff” sister meme that flummoxes me every time I log onto Facebook.
I’m also not the 33 year old who called her boss from the recovery room 10 minutes after 30 hours of labor mostly without an epidural and asked what proposals were in house, or the 46 year old who tried to convince her surgeon and her husband she could return to work 4 weeks after having 3 cervical vertebrae laminated and fused together. I just believe in the value of slowing down.
I might still be the 52-year-old who worked from her cellphone while in recovery from carpal tunnel release surgery both times she had it done, left wrist first, right wrist second 2 weeks later.
Maybe not. My husband would kill me if I pulled that again.
Point is, I do things from my perch on the sofa. Sometimes it’s figuring out how to get an 85lb Dane Supermutt to actually snuggle up and be a lapdog. Most of the time it’s sorting through the writing and craft portfolios I didn’t realize I actually had and posting them on my website.
Don’t ask how I honestly believed I did not have a portfolio of published writing and original craft designs. I do this stuff for the love of it and don’t pay attention to the rest? I suck at self-promotion? I’m oblivious? A combination of all 3?
I also spend a fair amount of time watching Ella look at me sheepishly after I’ve caught her licking the paw with the nail she broke down to the quick that refuses to heal because she won’t leave it alone.
Pause again, get the cone of shame, wrangle the Dane Mutt moving her head around in disgust to get the cone of shame over her head, add the inflatable collar behind the cone of shame because Ella is ElastiDog and can curl around the cone of shame to get to that paw.
Channel Virginia Wolf in the process.
Lately I’ve been mentally making a list of unusual places to put a toddler’s potty chair so I can finish Joey and the Potty, that children’s story I wrote on the fly for my niece that I mentioned earlier. Next up is Ella and the Video Game Prince about a little boy who refuses to go outside because he loves video games too much and eventually falls into a …oh God. I’m old. I’ve been picturing an Atari 2600 Space Invaders game cartridge as the thing he turns into. I need to go back and rethink that…
A fair amount of the time I work on Frankenblanket, an area rug I am crocheting using random stitches and yarn when I can wrangle it from the dogs, who have already started using it.
I’m plenty productive from my sofa seat. I’m also content, relaxed, and recharged when I log onto my computer Monday morning.
I know I can, and I don’t get tired because once a week I relax and do.
There’s JR on FaceTime.
–CMR
What’s your favorite place to perch and ignore all the stuff you think you should be doing on the weekends? Post it in the comments.
