I’m trying to be more mindful about how I spend my free time. I especially don’t want my weekends to feel too much like my weekdays, which tends to happen when you work at home. Even if I’m not writing over the weekend, I have a bad habit of spending a lot of time online or otherwise sitting at my computer. So, to encourage myself to spend weekends in a way that feels like a weekend, I came up with three main categories of kinds of Saturday, and I try to plan in advance what I’m going to do, so I don’t get into a round of “What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” with myself.

One category is work. That can include writing if I need to catch up after having other stuff come up during the week. It may also include things like workshops, conferences, conventions, book festivals, etc. It also includes projects around the house or in the yard, like organizing or gardening.

Another category is adventure, which is what I’m calling activities that involve leaving the house. That can include classes, touring and exploring, hiking, museums, and that sort of thing.

And then there’s cozy/creating. This is good for rainy or snowy days and involves things that are good to do on a cozy day at home. I added the “creating” so I’d have to do something other than just read. It may involve baking, cooking (especially trying new recipes), sewing, embroidery, knitting, coloring, music and stuff like jigsaw puzzles.

I pondered a social category, but that usually involves leaving the house, so it could be “adventure,” or else it’s something like a block party that involves work or creating to prep for. A few weeks ago, there was a choir party, so I spent the day baking before the party. Generally, social activities are an add-on to a weekend, and if they’re a focus of a weekend, like the church retreat, then they’re also an adventure.

I imagine I’ll have a lot more cozy/creating Saturdays during the winter, more work in spring and summer when I have yard work and gardening to do, and more adventure in the fall, when there are all the festivals, looking at leaves, hiking trips, and that kind of thing.

I generally try to save Sunday afternoons for rest. I have church and choir in the mornings, and I usually walk there, so that gives me some exercise. In the afternoons I read and maybe cook. Sometimes I have things scheduled that would fit into my other weekend categories. The church does field trips and the pastor leads prayer walks (meditative hikes) once a month.

The Saturday before last was a cozy/creating day because it was rainy. I baked bread and read. But there was also some work because there was an online seminar.

Last weekend was a mix of all of them. I had a pottery class in the morning, which counted as adventure, creating, and work (since it’s research for a book and I asked the teacher questions that have come up in my writing). Then in the afternoon the hiking group did a city walkabout hike. Between walking downtown and back for the class and the hike, my phone says I walked more than 9 miles that day. It’s a good thing I had a restful Sunday afternoon planned because my legs were tired and my upper body got a workout from the pottery.

This coming weekend I have another pottery class on Saturday, then a committee meeting after church Sunday and then one of my neighbors is having a party Sunday evening, but we’re also expecting a big winter storm, so I don’t know how much of it will end up happening. It’ll be really cold Saturday morning but the snow isn’t supposed to start until later, so the pottery class may happen (I’ll drive instead of walking if it’s that cold), but we could get about 10 inches of snow overnight Saturday, so there’s a chance the Sunday stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if the neighbor will cancel the party or just assume we can fight our way through the snow across the street. After the pottery class, I plan on going full cozy. There will be baking, soup, and cocoa. If it’s going to snow, it would be nice if some of it would happen while I can watch it. I’ve found that it tends to snow overnight here. You wake up and there’s snow on the ground but you don’t get to watch it fall very often, and I only really like snow when it’s falling. I love to watch it fall but could do without it once it hits the ground.

The local weather people started off all “don’t buy the hype” about the storm but are now saying to make preparations, so that means grocery shopping today to beat the rush.