Gosh, my life is so busy!

I had surgery on my foot a week ago (i.e. pray for me please...seriously...it was kind of a risky choice), and hence have LOTS of time on my hands since I can't actually walk and won't be able to for a couple more weeks. However, I have made a sad attempt to occupy that time by creating small projects for myself. These currently include:

1. doing contract work for my buddy Curt's new start up company

2. watching a daily online movie courtesy of Netflix (for a moment there I was trying to remember how to spell 'courtesy' and the first thing that came to mind was c-u-r-r....no...)

3. reading books - Jane Austen...check. Ernest Hemingway....check. Dostoyevsky....here I come...
4. taking an online Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course to get certified so that someday in my dreams I can go teach English in a foreign country.

5. laying on mom's couch

6. laying on dad's couch

7. playing Mahjong Titans, Minesweeper, and Solitaire

8. Tomorrow I'm going to start writing letters to all my queridos amigos in Portugal. (I'm actually really excited about that one...)

9. facebooking (arrgg...)

10. taking Goodreads book trivia quizzes

I'm kind of amused at how my mind works. I'm so used to having a busy schedule and planning out my day and everything that I have to get done, that I find myself waking up in the morning now and saying to myself: "Well, after breakfast I'll do some work for Curt for an hour, and then I'll do a unit for my online class, and then...well, then it's probably a good time to play Minesweeper for a little bit. But only for a half hour. Then I will eat lunch. Then I will read Sense and Sensibility, this time outside on the lawn chair....and then I will watch a movie." Like this is a list of things that I actually need to get done, and that for some reason, they need to be properly scheduled at the most appropriate time.

Sad, right? I should be relishing my 3-4 weeks of laying around doing nothing, but I think it's physically and mentally impossible for me. I have to pretend that Solitaire is something that needs to be urgently done so that I can continue to feel like I have a productive life, but then I have to limit my pointless activities to a certain amount of time so that I don't feel like a completely worthless human being (#1 and #4 above are currently the only reason I'm sane.) It's not that I'm opposed to relaxation, I just don't like doing it on a couch every hour of every day for an entire month.

SO the current "tricking myself into thinking I have things I need to do" is going through all my picture files on my computer. Mind you, this is not to organize them. I already did that. That would be legitimately productive. This time it is simply to...look at them. (Really pathetic part: I've been spreading it out over a few days....like, today I looked at 2007. Yesterday was 2006.)

While weeding through WAY too many pictures of zoo/aquarium animals and mountains, I did come across this gem that I found greatly amusing, if not somewhat disappointing:

Three points to whoever can figure out who's squeezed in there between Alisa and Amy.