In search of the 29-hour day

I can't figure out where the hours in my day are going, but I'm pretty sure I need about 5 more of them to sort my life out the way it's supposed to be.

I know I got a little off the mark last week when my sister's heart attack ate a rather serious chunk out of what my week was supposed to look like, but I was hugely grateful that my scheduled sick day allowed me to get my own health reviewed and to spend some time at the hospital with her. (My checkup suggests that my own chance of having a heart attack in the next 10 years is about 1%; that does not, of course, reduce my chance of being hit by a bus. Her prognosis is excellent.)

I've become somewhat absorbed by the computer lately, spending probably way too much time playing the Mah Jong game that came with my new operating system and following several of my professional friends on Twitter. That foolishness has cut way into my newspaper reading and crossword puzzle time, although I do try to follow at least several news items online so I don't feel totally in the dark. Still, my laptop almost never cools down if I'm in the house. I'm thinking that may not be a good thing; I don't think "surfing the web" counts as "heart-healthy" exercise, and I'm thinking that's at least some of what I need here.

I have tried working out a bit. After Christmas I acquired a "wave," a supposedly hot new exercise toy that I could stand on and rock as I did some fairly common routines, but that fizzled because (a) it was obviously for persons a whole lot of years—or maybe decades—younger than me and (b) about 90% of the workout was little more than what I had been doing on a homemade exercise step for several years. So I took that back to Wally World, dragged out my old exercise videos, and managed to work in one or another of them a couple of times a week for the past couple of weeks. Still not exactly what I think the heart association folks expect of me, I think.

I've been cranking out nominations for professional organization awards at work, and that has taken hours out of my evenings; my mornings are usually filled by grading papers and my afternoons often involved counseling students on how to write or revise assignments. That sticks me at the office after hours to work on the nominations, or I wind up bringing some part or the other of my job to do at home.

I sort of like the idea of helping Number One Son fix supper around here, but that doesn't work well if I'm catching up on work, and weekends are going to be packed for a while now with a consulting project that I need to crank out. I like the money, but I do miss being able to sleep in now and again!

I think 5 more hours a day would just about get it. I don't like the sound of 6 because that would be just too many, and the 30-hour day just sounds so wrong to me. That extra hour would no doubt just be extraneous.

So I'm off in search of the 29-hour day. And maybe whatever it is that's making my "m" key stick.