Wednesday still needs to do her laundry...

In the vein of Christina’s post, I simply must recommend to you a book about positive psychology: “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It’s about maximizing your life, and it will blow your mind.

Okay! My challenge!

I’ve known about this for a long time—longer than any of you, because I came up with it—and yet I still decided to wait until today to complete my challenge. I had a work meeting in the early afternoon, so I was planning on spending my four hours at the laundromat doing laundry (which hasn’t happened in about a month, hence qualifying it for the “don’t usually do” stipulation) and reading articles for work (which I will be doing more often, but don’t yet).

But instead, I did the following!

Hour 1:

After my work meeting, I headed to my lab to work on some really exciting things: new signs for the doors in the lab. “Psycholinguistics Laboratory” and “Don’t knock if the red light is on”, that kind of thing. But there is actually some funniness to this!

My boss is a rather [read: quite] elderly lady with mysterious motivations for the things she finds important. When she was showing me around the lab (that I had already been working in the whole semester for course credit), she pointed out that the signs on the front of the door were crinkly and suggested I make new ones. Sure! So I made some. Then, at the next week’s lab meeting, I suggested that, since I was already making signs for one door, I might also make a new sign for the eyetracking lab we have. For some completely unknown reason, my boss refused to allow it. “Her door is fine,” she crowed, referring to the grad student who uses that particular lab. Now, if my signs are janky, this girl’s sign is in terrible condition. So I promised her I’d make her a new sign. And that’s what I did.

Hours 2 and 3:

Instead of doing laundry, I have spent a very smiley day helping out with a production of “Alice in Wonderland: The Musical” that is being put on by a local youth theater program. The show, which goes up this weekend!, is directed by our own Miss Monday and involves some other folks I like alot. : ) I have done very little work with theater, so sewing costumes and making prop spears were new and exciting experiences.

Hour 4:

As part of my help with the show, I got to go on a supply run. The stage manager (I think that is her title? Forgive me if I’m wrong! [edit: I have been informed that her title is, in fact, Technical Director]), who is wonderful, needed some brown spray paint and sticky tack. Now, you may be asking, “Carlyn, that should not have taken an hour! What in the world did you do for an hour?” I will tell you, reader. I searched high and low for that damned sticky tack! And it turns out Meijer does not even carry it when it’s not back-to-school season. Go figure. Luckily Staples was readier to meet my need. The kind sales clerk walked me right over to the sticky tack aisle, and there were several varieties—mine for the perusing.

So, that’s what I did on my challenge. It was a really truly good day.