My Ten-Point Plan for Whiling Away my Vacation

Contrary to rumor, I am done with finals and have begun the labor of love known as Winter Break. I am not someone who takes easily to having a whole month off. In fact, my first reaction was to sit around the apartment staring listlessly at the floor and begging Mike to assign me a problem set. I moved on from there to the intense consumption of light fiction. That went well with my third project, intense bread baking, because when you're done with one chapter of your crime novel it's probably time to mist the bread again so that it will develop a french-type crust. My training in the scientific method has payed off, in that I finally figured out why my previous breads had failed to rise. I was following instructions to use water the temperature of my wrist, but as I have mentioned, my body temperature is several degrees lower than that of normal people and the yeast weren't getting warm enough to be gassy. I looked up the temperature at which yeast are killed and consulted the rubbishy thermometer we usually use for narrowing our body temperature to a range between 92 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The rubbishmeter seemed to suggest, with no precision whatsoever, that I could raise the temperature of the bread water by quite a bit without killing the yeast, so I decided to give it a shot. The result was a palpable loaf of part-wheat bread. I am currently at work on my fifth successful career loaf, and am moving on from such elementary questions as "why isn't the sonofabitch expanding?" to stumpers like "how can I get the middle to be fluffy without burning the outside?" and "how do I knead the dough for twenty minutes without getting carpal tunnel?" The fourth major vacation project is cleaning the apartment. I never finished unpacking from our move in September; in fact I never finished putting stuff up on the walls, not even when Jeff and Scott came to visit. My homemaking is the object of ridicule across the country, and let's not get started on Mike, who, in collaboration with Eugene, managed to ignore a spilled bottle of orange soda on his floor for three weeks back in 1999. I conjecture that since it was equidistant from their two beds each boy considered it to be No Man's Sticky Orange Puddle. My fifth project is to work from home on what I normally work on from under the leaky pipe in the Environmental Health Sciences Division. Sixth is that article I've been talking about writing since junior year of college. Seventh, I am supposed to be updating my resume and applying for internships for the summer, but as I can't seem to cope with asking for recommendations number seven should really be working on becoming a normal person. My eighth activity will expire tomorrow evening, when I "audition" to teach a Kaplan course. For my audition I have planned a lesson on How to Converse about Sports. Ninth is a steady regimen of Christmas Carols. I've been waging a Caroling war with the neighbors ever since our downstairs ones (of whom I'm really quite fond) put "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas" on repeat for an hour. A couple of repetitions of "Mary's Boy Child Jesus Christ" from us put an end to that. I also sing. A lot. Especially the carols whose notes I never really hit, such as Gloo-o-o-o-o-o-oo-o-o-o-o-oo-o-o-o-o-o-ooria in Excelsis Deo, and the high note in "River." My tenth pursuit is Christmas shopping. Not actual shopping, yet, more imagining what gifts I would get for everyone if I were rich. This activity generally ends in my taking an excedrin for the tension headache I only get during Advent.

So, you see, I am just constructive as dammit.