Solving My Own Problems With New Ones

Gentle readers, you will perhaps remember that I suffer from periodic boredom.  There is, naturally, plenty to do, but it is mainly made of things that are.... less interesting.  Granola making, eternal laundry, and so on.  (Periodic illness or injury is also not very interesting.  I slipped a disk in my back right after I recovered from the early-summer surgery...)

So I have been trying to amuse myself.

I had a useless closet and hallway next to my front door (this house has approximately 28 linear feet of bedroom closet!).  I removed it and sledgehammered out the floor:

put in appropriate wall/insulation/new wiring/etc. (SAFETY FIRST):

and made shelves and stuff

which took months

and months

and months.

Meanwhile, I organized a seven-family, $3500 Ikea order for all the things.  (Have I mentioned that it is VERY rural here?  The nearest non-Walmart store is 50 miles away.)

(I also 'adopted' the five Jewish first-year students, hosted Thankgiving for us plus eight more people, and had 31 people over for Sweetpea's birthday.  Oh, and there was teaching, too, of course.)

Eventually my very dear father came to help me finish it up:

I made a walnut slab into a table, which I love:

and I made a hat rack:

and another rack:

and I think that twelve hooks is not enough and I'm going to put eight more below the tall shelf, and hang that mirror someday soon.

I put up shelves it the kitchen!  I reorganized the whooooole sewing room/ office/ spare room (well, I'm still working on it - when our student(s) come over this evening I may have them move one piece of furniture).  I cleaned!

Then I enrolled myself in the next course in the tech-type-certificate-thing I'm doing.  (This instructor seems to think she's teaching middle schoolers, and the assignments are like being pecked to death by ducks.  Really, we need THAT many participation grades?!?! - this whole course is for people in their 30s and 40s who already have at least one degree).

THEN two people quit from one of the departments I work for, and I made the mistake of giving a soft no ("If you can get an exception from the dean for me to teach another lab, I'll do it") so now I have a lecture and FIVE labs.

THEN I decided I was still bored and I am teaching myself Python and then C++ so I can collaborate on my spouse's research so I can, maybe, eventually, find something more intellectually rewarding to do for money.

ALSO the spouse got a big grant and it has travel money and so he's going to a conference in Australia so we're ditching the kids with my parents for two weeks and going to Australia this summer.

NOW my brain is so full that this morning, I put my shopping list in my pocket, forgot my wallet at home, and, once I finally arrived at the store with everything I needed, couldn't find my shopping list (which was still in my pocket.) 

[All that said... I work maybe 20 hours a week, five minutes from my house, don't work at all in the summer, have lots of time to garden, read lots of interesting books, and have enough money to not really worry too much.  Endless Lab Teaching may not be particularly thrilling, but overall, this is not so bad.]  

Maybe, JUST MAYBE, my definition of boredom needs a little work.