Stay-cation Schmay-cation

Time off from work often frustrates me (unless I'm actually going away on vacation, but that almost never happens). Don't get me wrong--not going into the office is a fine thing indeed. It's just that I always have a long list of projects I want to get done and I almost never make a large enough dent in the list to satisfy myself. I've tried to compensate by making smaller lists. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't.

After the first day of vacation this go round, I was feeling pretty crappy. I was tired, and didn't feel like I was going to get a good start on my list of projects. We've decided we want to freeze a lot of food for use during the first few months of baby time, so it's about time to get moving on that front. Over the weekend, we bought a case of tomatoes at the farmers market ($12. Good deal!), and I made it my mission to use as many as I could. So first thing on Monday, I started working in the kitchen. Late on Tuesday, I was finally done with all the cooking I could stand to do.

This is the result.
Left to right, that's tomato soup, pesto, spaghetti sauce, guacamole and salsa. Bearing in mind that the pesto contains no tomato, those containers represent something like 110 tomatoes (and I think I had 30 or so tomatoes leftover). I love cooking, but after working in the kitchen for the better part of two days, I feel like I don't have much to show for it. (There was another container of guacamole, but Hollie and I ate it. Also, I'm not freezing the guac or the salsa, I'm eating them now.)

Now, that's not all I did on Monday and Tuesday, but it sure felt like it. I also added two coats of Alien Green to a wall in the nursery, and started on the cabinets I needed to put up. But in terms of something physical that I could point to and say, "Hey, I got something done!" that food is basically it.

But today? Ooh boy, today felt good. This is what I got done today.
Eight hours ago, that wall was bare. Hollie's dad came over and helped me get these two cabinets up on the wall above the changing table. The wall that I painted again on Monday. After he left, I got the doors up.
We also took a trip to Lowe's so we could use the van to get a small shed I wanted for the side of the house. (Side note: I feel like every major project I've tackled in the last six months has been to add storage of some form or another to my tiny house.)

End result?
There's a vast difference between cooking and construction. I know this. But there's something about a home improvement project that is inherently more satisfying. Maybe it's the physical size of the things I tackled today. Maybe it's the sweat that goes into manual labor. Whatever it is, I felt awful about what I had been able to accomplish by Tuesday afternoon, but 24 hours later, I feel pretty excellent. Let's hope the next two days feel this good.