Days for cats and dogs

These are days for cats and dogs in this house. I'm on break and feel my time stretching like a cat instead of constricting like a boa, as it seems to do during work days, and the whole family appreciates the more relaxed atmosphere. Unlike on work days, I'm not impatient or annoyed or racing to get somewhere. Of course, I'm grateful to have a job I love but I'm also immensely thankful (and at the appropriate time, too!) that I get a respite from its intensity.

That more relaxed schedule has been very evident for the past two days. A trip yesterday to my stylist for a long-needed and postponed haircut and then on to the mall for lunch and some shopping at my favorite store, Talbot's (including not one, but two stops at Starbucks!). And a trip to the university district for lunch and a movie today. Tonight, I re-watched several episodes of Little Dorrit and I'm tempted to get out my Pride and Prejudice tapes from the hall closet and re-watch them for the twentieth? hundredth? time.

Since Friday's start of the break, Lizzy and Hamlet have been enjoying more attention and when they managed to sit next to each other as I finished my Little Dorrit session I called my husband to take the sibling portrait above. Hamlet was leaning against a cushion cover my sister-in-law gave us a long time ago, which has a black cat pictured on it, and it's hard to tell where Hamlet ends and the cushion cat begins. Curious Lizzy had to get her nose into the lens and made us laugh when we saw the picture. It's so Lizzyesque.

Meanwhile, my determination for this Thanksgiving break is to make the most of it and enjoy the kinds of things I don't get to do during the semester. That includes reading a new novel, Wolf Hall, which is in no way related to my scholarship or my teaching (full disclosure: I'm also reading The Haunting of Hill House for my class next semester), and watching HBO movies (yesterday I caught the Keanu Reeves re-make of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which probably ranks as the worst movie I've ever seen even when I didn't see the whole thing). I've also watched Bride Wars and parts of Marley and Me, movies that you couldn't have dragged me to the theater to watch but that are fine when there is nothing else pressing to be done. Or, let me be more accurate: there are things to get done but they're not due tomorrow or the next day or the next.

I am so grateful for having this gift of time to recoup and recalibrate and recenter and I will do this time justice. In fact, my plan is to juice this time until it's given up its very last drop. Tomorrow morning: To the gym I go!