We usually swim laps on Sunday evenings. Today I said, let's go early! We can be sure to get a lane and get it out of the way and go on to do something! Then I listed a just a few of eight thousand potential projects that are not even that hard that we haven't gotten around to yet. Like hang some more pictures, because we've been living in this house for over two years now and it's recently occurred to me it might be nice to have something to break up all those beige walls. Which we swore would not be beige for long, but let's get real, beige they are and beige they will stay, until we sell the house or die of laziness.
So anyway, we managed to leave the house before two p.m., which believe me, is a fairly big deal. We were so excited, and because we had the whole afternoon ahead of us, we could swim as long as we liked.
It turns out we liked to swim for an hour* and then we liked to play around in the deep end for another 30 minutes. It turns out it was 103 this afternoon. It turns out that when we got back from swimming and lunch, we were a little tired. So we put in an episode of Planet Earth and sat down to watch some relaxing nature footage until we got our second wind.
At some point I moved to the floor to get more comfortable. Two hours later I woke up to the Planet Earth theme song. It felt like it had been playing over and over for a long time. And by then there was no more afternoon, and I was disoriented and in a vile mood and had nap breath that in hindsight I should have used to remove the beige paint from the walls. And then all of a sudden it was time to go to the grocery store and give up on everything else.
So that's why I didn't do a goddamn thing today. At least this time I have an excuse. Sort of.
*There are not nearly enough lap lanes in this city, so usually there are a bunch of uberjock swimmers with high-tech gear
anxiously going all vulture on the occupied lanes. They look so serious with their silver caps and timers and streamlined little leg floats and swimsuits that weren't designed primarily for sitting around in the shade reading a book and don't ride up inconveniently over their torsos. They make me feel like a huge flailing lane hog and an impediment to their exceptional fitness and maybe even their very reason for existence. I know, whatever, I paid my three bucks too, but it's still intimidating. But today it was early enough that hardly
anyone was there and we felt no pressure whatsover to finish up and make room for athletic excellence. Which was marvelous but ultimately turned out to be our undoing.