Sunday Sundries--What Would You Do with 3 Hours?

God willing and if the creek don't rise, my husband will be off his medically-imposed, three month driving restriction on March 21st. There will be much rejoicing.

While he's gotten a ride home with a couple of co-workers at night (a blessing), I have had to do all the driving for us. That included driving to and from Virginia for a visit to my brother and a trip to and from Bowling Green, KY, last month. While I've done long hauls before and drove quite a bit for a previous job, it's been a trial. And for every day he's worked, I had to drive him in, then drive back home. Takes about twenty minutes to a half hour for the round trip, but some days there were accidents or other issues making it much longer.

So, hopefully, I'll be able to gain about three hours of my life back every week. I started thinking about it, especially "losing" the hour with Daylight Savings Time and the whole "spring forward" thing.

Three hours or so is a chunk of time. It's a gift. While usually I've enjoyed the time talking with my honey and I truly do try to live to serve, if he could drive himself to and from work and run errands on his own, I'm thinking it might really help. After all:

Let me explain--usually when I get home from taking Chris to work at 2:15pm, I have around forty-five minutes before I have to leave for work. I can't get started on a new project and often don't have time to get back into what I was doing before we left if it involves any concentration at all. I usually take the time to brush my teeth, fix my lunch and piddle around. If I didn't have the interruption, I could continue editing, finish writing that scene I'd started or get another ten pages of notes into order.

On the other hand:

There have been many times when social media has taken control of my life. I have:
Facebook accounts: 2 ("real" name and author name, not counting the "author page")

Pinterest accounts: 2 ("real" name and author name)

email accounts: 3 I check regularly (2 "real" name and 1 author name)

AND I was stupid and installed Jewel Quest III on my laptop. Duh.

When I was doing a lot of counted cross-stitch, I found some friends on the AOL XS board that did something called "the rotation system." It was where you work on each UFO (UnFinished Object) for a limited period of time. It might be you have a project for every day of the week or work on each pattern for one week at a time or a certain number of hours. This helps finish items that you're sick of, that's a gift or that you're in the middle of a boring section, because when you finish something, you get the option of starting that new project that is exciting. I did a massive amount of cross-stitch in the early 2000s with this method. I have about twenty projects yet unfinished, though. Here are just two:

This is called Skyler Wayne--the designer named her patterns after her grandsons--and it's exactly half finished. I haven't touched it in years. Here's another one that hasn't seen the light of day in way too long:

This is titled Harmony. There is part of another leaf I am half-way through in the bottom middle that's been added since this picture was taken. It was going to be a gift for my mother for surviving breast cancer in the late 1990s. She died in 2004.

So, not only should I use my "found" time for something creative and productive (like stitching, beading or trying out the knitting looms and yarn I bought), but I should apply the rotation principle to my writing too. Little snippets of time--an hour here and a half hour there--would help me finish that scene, organize that folder of notes, transcribe that notebook.

What would you do with an extra three hours in your week?