Keeping an Eye on the World Going By...

I'm not generally a lazy person, but there are times where I fondly dream of a time when I had absolutely nothing to do for a prolonged period of time. There are some who argue that I'm pretty close to that already, since I no longer have to get up early, go to school, and teach a full class load--but my schedule stays relatively full. I have Comic Shop News to do on a weekly basis, and it takes time to put together 10,000 to 12,000 words a week. I put in time doing Dr. No's stuff each week--about 30 hours or so, if you combine the hours I actually spend at the store and the time I spend at home doing accounting work and related store duties.

I've never actually had a long period of time with nothing to do. The closest I came to it, I guess, was the summers of 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1982. Those were years when I taught full time and didn't do anything else, and I wasn't taking a summertime course for certificate renewal (something teachers are required to do on a regular basis). During those six summers, I basically had nothing I had to do for about two months at a time. I wish I knew what I did to fill up my schedule for those two months; I know I spent a lot of 1976 building bookshelves at our Cedartown house and in Rome, where I built bookshelf units for Mom and Dad. In 1982 I devoted a lot of time to Randy Satterfield's store, A World of Words--that was the comics/sf shop he had before he, Ward, and I bought Dr. No's. I have no real idea what I did during the other years...

Now I can't imagine what it would be like to have two months or so with nothing that had to be done. I'd love to have time to draw again, to paint, to record music (I'm not good at it, but the technology of it amuses me), to watch movies or television whenever I felt like it... It sounds almost idyllic. I know, though, that I'd probably spend way too much of the time noodling about on-line, and I suspect I'd end up posting about eleven blog entries per day.

So what would you do with two months of absolutely no duties and responsibilities?