I’m off work this week. It feels amazing to have time to myself that I don’t have to rush through, that I don’t have to be productive in.

Each morning, I get up and blog. I check the writing prompt in my site’s dashboard, and it’s usually enough to get me going. I moved my swim lane reservation from 5:30am to 9am, because I like having time to get up and eat, write, and have some coffee before I go to the pool. Once I’m there, I take as long as I want; I don’t have to rush. I add in extra kick drills because I have the time and it’s super fun to zoom down the lane with fins on. In the afternoons, I walk around the garden and check all my flowers, then sit and read under the dogwood tree.

I’ve got two books going. I’m reading Go Gentle by Maria Semple, the author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette? and I’m re-reading The Odyssey in preparation for the movie coming out in July. I read it for the first time just before my sabbatical last year, and this year I joined Book Riot’s read-along of the book to have some community around it. It’s super immersive this go round, now that I’ve gotten through my first time and have some familiarity with it. My first morning run after beginning it, the clouds were pink and stretched across the sky in long fingers, and I felt all effervescent and connected under the rosy-fingered dawn.

One of my stray thoughts as I read is that as Odysseus and his son Telemachus show up on the shores of other kingdoms, and are brought into the palaces, they are fed and clothed and taken care of by their hosts, even though their hosts don’t know who they are. Often they are given fine gifts, and their hosts make promises to ferry them across the sea, before they even tell their names. Is there a message here: be kind to beggars and strangers, you never know what greatness lies beneath?

I mentioned this to our son, who is reading Crime and Punishment, and he laughed and said the opposite is true there: the narrator’s friend hosts him and cares for him, not knowing he is a murderer. We talked about it over coffee, because I was able to take him out for coffee yesterday with all my free time. Then we went to the grocery store together, midafternoon when everyone else is working and the aisles are blissfully empty, to buy shrimp and cilantro, sour cream and slaw. He made us shrimp tacos last night between the France/Iraq and Norway/Senegal World Cup matches.

In a few minutes, my husband and I will hit the road to head to his cousin’s wedding. It’s a Thursday pool party in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. It’s not an easy place to get to from here. The closest airport is three hours away, and the drive is 13 hours. We decided, what the heck, let’s take the week and make a road trip of it. All of our drives tend to be north and south, always on the same highways. We’ll see new scenery on this drive: we’re going west. I’m not sure if I’ll blog from the road or not. I’ll see how I feel. What freedom!