Friday is the best day

For some time now, GF and I have made it a tradition to take Friday as our day off together. Sometimes university duties will intervene, but I no longer ever have to teach on Fridays and rarely have Friday committee meetings more than once a month. One of the advantages about working at an urban campus is that the faculty live spread out all over the city and suburbs, and no one wants to drive in more than three or four days a week if they can help it. And anyway, it's the summer now, so my Fridays have been clear. (I should note that GF and I both work on Sat and Sun, so it's not like we're total slackers. )

We always start Friday by sleeping late, without setting the alarm clock. Then we have breakfast and take the dogs to the park (sometimes stopping by the bagel shop on the way to the park, for an extra special treat). After the park, we take the dogs home, and then usually go out to lunch. Maybe a trip to the public library or a matinee movie, sometimes coffee out at Starbucks. It's great to have a day that we've set aside just for spending time together, not filled with chores or errands or work.

The past couple of Fridays we've started a new pattern, picking up take-out food on the way home from the park, and then hanging out on the couch and watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica, which we're currently watching on DVD from Netflix. I almost never watch TV or movies at home during the day, unless I'm sick -- it makes me feel sort of depressed or icky (although going out for a matinee doesn't). But this has been a fun twist on our usual routine, and especially nice when it's hot and you don't feel like running around so much. It feels like playing hooky, which is really the main theme of our Fridays -- taking a day off when other people are all at work.

I've been totally loving BSG, too. Starbuck as a woman is awesome -- and as close to a butch hottie I'm ever going to get to see on TV. (Although the last episode just showed her in a formal dress, which dashed my view somewhat.) The mix of action, politics, and intrigue seems just about right in most episodes. We're only toward the end of season one, and I'm already feeling sad that we'll run out of disks soon. That's the only problem with watching shows on DVD, waiting another year before they come out. GF keeps reminding me that there are other shows and movies waiting to be watched, and it's true that I have 187 in my queue. But they won't be BSG. And a good thing about watching this show, as opposed to all the other ones we're currently watching (this is the summer of TV on DVD for us -- seeing all these cable shows we wouldn't get to watch otherwise) is that Commander Adama looks a lot like one of my academic mentors. So I watch the show and then I start feeling like I should do some work. Or send him an email. Or prove myself somehow. And that's not a bad thing, even on my day off. It gets me feeling motivated for tomorrow.

For the rest of today? Blogs, maybe some fun reading, a trip to the gym. Maybe I'll start playing the computer game I got for my birthday. There's a lot of stuff in the "should" pile -- the leaky faucet to fix, the files to continue purging, the pants to hem -- but today is Friday, for frack's sake. All that stuff can wait til tomorrow.