What happened to weekends?

When I was a child my Father used to come home from work on Friday night and that was it, the weekend started. He never brought work home with him and weekends revolved around him playing golf Saturday and Sunday mornings (my Mother must have been a saint!), my Mother and I shopping, visits to the pub and long drives to visit places - does anyone ever just go for a drive any more? The visits to the pub were more when I was a teenager and my brother who is seven years older than me was still living at home. If this was planned the traditional roast went out the window and my Mother would decide to do a steak pie which sounds great but my Mother's expertise at making pastry always became suspect after several halves of Guinness (it was before wine was generally being drunk at home - she became an officienado (sp?) of that much later on when her favourite phrase was 'Is it wine time yet?'). When we got home she was inevitably a little tipsy and as I said would make (and I mean make not just pull out of the freezer) pastry which was fine but it was when it came to rolling it out and placing it on the steaming pie. Inevitably it always ended with floating islands of pastry on a sea of gravy but it tasted delicious.

Why am I reminiscing? Because I seem to have lost sight of weekends. For example this weekend should have started Friday night but what was I doing I was marking? Then yesterday the only time I left my room was to act as a taxi driver for my son other than that I was battling with two papers - one for a symposium and one for a conference. I thought I was happy with the symposium paper until I re-read it and realised that there was no cohesion to it. In fact it was pretty crappy. And the conference paper is about something that is way out of my comfort zone. Even now I have no confidence in either of them. From there I went on to more marking - I need to stay on top of it as there is more coming in this week and the week after. I ended up doing a bit of reading for my PhD - the only bit that was really for me whilst listening to the Elton John concert - yes that triggered quite a bit of reminiscing too. Please don't misunderstand all this work is not because I am slacking during the week just that I don't have enough time in the days to fit it in. Today we got an extra hour in bed but I was up just as early and started marking. Just have to plan classes for this week and if I can manage it I want to do more on my PhD. I think I am still on track with it but get the feeling it could be swept away at any moment. Tomorrow is the first day of November, it is a month when a decision has to be made as to when I am going to submit. I have no idea which way it is going to go.


Hope your weekend let you find the child in you again.

Note to self: must remember what a weekend is for.