Hurray for camping!

On a warm summer’s afternoon, on a manuscript-editing zoom session, the conversation turned to weekend plans.

On this particular Friday, K was happily headed out for camping, while Y was happily staying home with one of her children while her other child camped with her spouse.

As for me? I would be camping with my family, too, though not especially happily. As content as I am to run or hike through the woods, camping is not my thing. It feels to me like trying to make a game out of pretending to be severely under-resourced.

Knowing that my camping trip would begin on Sunday morning, I checked my to-do list. U, a coauthor on a different manuscript, would be abroad until the 19th, so there was no rush on that paper…. But I still owed B two introductory paragraphs for our first draft of yet another manuscript, and I owed L the results of my googling for college syllabus repositories, and I owed a journal a review of a 100-page manuscript … plus I needed to send messages to ten separate teams of EvCC colleagues to gently remind them that their missing assessment reports were now three months overdue.

It seemed like a lot, and it also seemed familiar — just the latest version of a sad Friday afternoon. But, fueled by extra coffee, I started chipping away when not occupied by parenting duties.

On Friday evening I cranked out two insipid but passable paragraphs for B.

On Saturday morning I woke up very early and thought, “Maybe I could put that peer review to bed too?” I transitioned into movie-critic mode — “I’m not fact-checking every little detail, I’m explaining how the paper made me feel…” — and cranked out 2.5 pages of possibly helpful feedback.

I checked the to-do list again.

A new thought came to me: could I actually finish this stuff? On to the googling and gentle reminder messages….

…And as Saturday afternoon gave way to Saturday night… Somewhere in the darkness, the gambler he broke even, as Kenny Rogers might say.

It’s hard to express how GOOD it felt to be caught up — to be able to head into this trip without lingering worries of hard, overdue projects. My mood was so good that it was barely even dampened by my anticipation of the camping activities themselves.

I’ll say this for camping: when you need a firm deadline, it can provide one. And sometimes that is all you really need.