Indoor Recess

Indoor Recess

Wasn’t indoor recess the best when you were in elementary school?  You stayed inside, kept nice and dry while the weather was yucky, and played games with your friends (or in my case, taped Jurassic Park trading cards to my desk).

It's even better when you're an adult.

Background: For those who don’t know, I work in a leadership role at a school.  It’s a solid gig.  I like it.

For those of you not in the Portland Metro area, there were rumors and newsflashes abound about a storm system heading in our direction Wednesday night.  So much snow!  Freezing rain!  Ice!  All of the things!

So yeah—the #1 question of the day for me and the powers that be: “are we going to close the school tomorrow?”.  Well, it all depended on what Mother Nature decided to do.  Alas, all I could do was shrug, say “we’ll see what happens”, and keep my fingers crossed that we would close too.

The news reports were getting worse.  Winter storm warning for your area!  Beware!  Texts were coming in!

We were all pumped.  Come on snow!  Mother Nature, work your magic!

Here’s what we woke up to.

Damn.

However, the reports were still coming in—snow is coming, just later in the day.  Freezing rain was starting to fall already and it could potentially make for icy conditions later in the evening.

My Director was awesome.  I knew he didn’t want to make the drive in the potential mess either, so he totally called a snow day with no snow.  Sweet.

I have a free day.  What to do?  I could have easily gotten some chores done.  I could have packed (I’m moving to a new place 10 minutes away, but that’s another post), cleaned, worked out, meditated, painted; a variety of things that would have helped me feel more accomplished and centered.

Do you think that’s what I did?

Hell no.

I texted my friend Becca:

“Let’s do a Breaking Bad marathon today.”

Spoiler free!  Don't worry!

Becca is the Breaking Bad series #1 fan.  It’s great—she lights up the whole room in adoration whenever she tells me about it sans spoilers.  Me?  I’ve heard about Breaking Bad (it’s the meth show, right?), but haven’t really invested any time into learning more about it.

When Becca found this out a while ago, she made it a goal for us to watch the show together.

Within the last week or so, we started the show from the very beginning.  This is my first time seeing it, Becca’s second.

In one week, we blasted through quite a few episodes.  Thanks to the snow day, we finished the first season of the series.  Yay!

So yeah—it could have been a day of phone calls, emails, meetings, all that grown up stuff.

Instead, all of the following happened:

--I hid my face in a pillow during all the bloody parts of the show.  I kept an eye on Becca so get the telltale “ok, it’s over” look before I could resume watching.

--There was a discussion over the superiority of PlayStation to Xbox.

--So many fur baby cuddles!  Becca has two pups and a kitty.

--We drank fresh coffee spiked with homemade Kahlua and half & half.

--We ate a wide assortment of noms, ranging from cheesy poofs to salad to Trader Joe’s fruit gems.

There’s your scene.  Indoor recess.  Watching an amazing story and vibrant characters (with lots and lots of drugs) on TV with a great friend, so many cuddly animals shifting to get comfortable and warm, a smorgasbord of awesome on the twin coffee tables from IKEA, and the blue light of freezing rain and  sunshine lighting up the room through the windows.

It’s so good to take a hiatus from the responsibilities of being a grown-up every now and then and just completely veg out with friends/cuddly animals/awesome socks.

al