Today celebrates my first actual day of unemployment. Fifteen more days to go before I'm once again gainfully employed.

I have a long list of yard and landscaping projects that I want to accomplish over this interval, including freeing several trees from english ivy, but the cold has kept me housebound. The snowstorm that has blanketed the northeast missed Atlanta, but it is frigid cold and windy out there today nonetheless. I spent most of the day cruising various music blogs.

Handling large blocks of unstructured time has never been my strong suit and the only obligations I have on my time are opening the zendo the next two Monday nights, and one fill-in opening on Tuesday, December 29. So the next two weeks will be a test of my self discipline as I try to avoid the kind of nocturnal lethargy I tend to drift into when not otherwise required to be elsewhere.