Life Requires Three Days Off Per Week

As a school teacher in France I worked Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. THREE DAYS! After a few months I started working Wednesday afternoons too, but as a tutor, and these hours were flexible. I also got to visit my tutoring pupils at their home in Nice every Wednesday, which was a great excuse to visit a much larger city than Antibes. I'd do some shopping, walk or lay on the beach or grab a kebab sandwich.

Now that I work full time I barely find the time or energy for laundry and reading at the end of the day. In fact, I've been trying to read more and find myself drifting off to sleep instead. I watch a lot of TV, daydream about winter being over, etc. That's my life. On Saturdays I'm so relieved to not be busy that I sleep really late then hang out in my PJs. Sometimes I run errands and these last two Saturdays I've gone to the gym for short workouts.

Last week I had Thursday off for Veteran's Day. A huge perk of working for the State. So basically I turned Thursday into a typical Saturday. I did absolutely NOTHING. I slept in, read a little, watched a lot of TV, hung out around the house. That's it. I don't even think I put on real clothes all day.

So when Saturday rolled around I actually had some energy and motivation! At 10am I met with a nice group of ladies to speak French. We had coffee and chatted for nearly 2 hours. Then I went to the gym for about an hour and returned home to find Leigh dressed and waiting for me. She wanted to get out for a few hours, so we went to Tidal Wave books and did some browsing and Christmas shopping. Then we hit up Target and went home, cleaned the apartment and cooked an amazing dinner. Leigh handled the dinner preparations (scallops in white wine sauce, roasted purple potatoes and steamed asparagus) while I baked a small batch of cookies. It was amazing! We haven't had such a nice, productive, not rushed Saturday since moving here.

Sunday was another lazy day with laundry, reading, etc but then we had a friend over to watch a special on PBS and eat dinner, which was nice. It was still tough when Monday morning rolled around, but at least I don't feel like I was just here 5 minutes ago! Just goes to show that life requires three days off per week. Whether it's three day weekends or a random day off mid-week, it's really necessary to have a day to recover from your work and two days to enjoy yourself. Even a half day in the mid-week would be great. Imagine going to work Wednesday morning knowing you were free to use your afternoon for errands or whatever without penalty? That would leave Saturdays for fun and Sundays for fun or just preparing for the coming week. I know this makes me less American to say, but sometimes the French really know what they're doing....