Time on my hands

Tomorrow I'm going to have to revisit my classroom, so I can finish cleaning it up a bit. After that, the summer is officially mine. Just like last summer, I'm hoping to make this one productive, as I don't want to simply goof off and just waste it.

What exactly do I hope to accomplish?

For starters, I want to do some writing. Not only that, but I want to finally write something that I can finally start looking into getting published. Didn't I write a whole novel last summer? Yeah, but it's what would pretty much be the last in a series of novels/stories. This time, I want to start writing from the beginning, and I think that I have some solid ideas with which to work. Of course, this means that I'll need to get the writing group going again that I had last summer. From what I've heard so far, the guys seem to be up for it. Hopefully I can get a few other people to read my stories. Oh, and I want to make this blog a little bit more regular than it has been lately.

I also need to do some reading. There are at least two books that I need to read, as they made the summer reading list for the pre-Honors freshmen, and I have not read them before. Other than that, I'd like to read another Shakespeare that I've never read before, another Vonnegut novel, and a few other books as well. I also have a lot of comics that have been sitting around for years that I haven't read for one reason or another. I just started reading The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told even though I've had it for years. I have some others like that as well, and I want to finally get through them.

There's also a lot of grunt work around the house that needs to be done. I need to clean out the garage and my backyard. Who knows, maybe I can finally make the backyard look like a place where people want to hang out.

I'm also going to see what I can do about getting my mortgage re-adjusted (or whatever the heck the word is for it). The way I see it, I'm not exactly hurting, and I'll be okay even if I can't. Still, if I can make things better, why shouldn't I? Unfortunately, this will involve a lot of persistence and phone calls, which is about as appealing to me as a root canal with a rusty drill.

I also need to see a new eye doctor, and I want to find one near me, as I need a new pair of glasses, since the backup pair that I have are in pretty sad shape. (I usually wear contacts.) I also need to see the regular doctor just to make sure I'm doing okay in general. I like my current doctor, but he's all the way in Clayton and he has lousy hours where I'd have to take a day off work just to see him. I'd like to find somebody more local.

Ultimately, I've realized that there's one thing that might get in the way of me doing what I want to do - and that's the computer. Of course, I need to use the computer to write my stories and blog entries, but I find myself spending too much time just dinking around the Internet. I'm going to need to set aside a certain amount of time for that kind of a thing, so I don't wind up wasting away my entire summer. That's going to be difficult, as usually when I sit down to write, I spend a bit of time just staring at the computer and reading all sorts of trivial crap until the mood finally hits me. Still, I think I can make this a summer where I feel proud of my accomplishments.