The window is left open a crack overnight to let the cool autumn air filter through the bedroom and facilitate sleep. The trees off The Urban Porch are just beginning to blush today, bright hues pulsing against an electric blue sky.

Every morning before I get out of bed I play a quick puzzle game on my phone where you connect colored dots on a grid. A few weeks ago a little pop up box told me I had just hit an unbroken streak of playing for 1000 days straight, which equals 2.7 years of doing the same thing – I suppose it is not unlike brushing your teeth or any other daily event, except it is an unnecessary one. This weird milestone does not accomplish much of anything beyond the indication that it has become a habit. Not a compulsion, not quite an addiction, but a steady routine.

Upon seeing this notification, I pretty much felt that whatever it was had come to a finale. After this grand and unintentional landmark of 1000, if I missed a day and it reset to zero it would not matter; it was an arrival to a conclusion that I never set out to achieve in the first place (see Streak 11/21/25 for some history). But I do enjoy that small morning habit and therefore have continued it anyway. This morning the pop up box informed me it was 1031 days.

This got me wondering about the usage of time in general. It probably takes about five to ten minutes (if that) to do the daily dots. Some mornings there are only two or three puzzles to complete and other days there are as many as ten or twelve. Some of them are ridiculously easy and some are hard enough to challenge your brain. I figure perhaps an average of seven minutes a day gets invested in this puzzle, which might be a generous guess. Math is not my forte, but it appears that would mean as of today I have devoted roughly 7217 minutes to this practice, which computes to five days out of my life over the last two-plus years. When I look at it that way it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Five days – meh.

But then I started thinking about all the other games and puzzles I play – mostly from the New York Times, but there are others. I like word games. Some of these take longer than seven minutes, at least one of them has taken about twenty. If you figured all those other games out and added it up (which I will not be doing) it would likely total many days. If I did know exactly how much time, it might bother me.

This begs the question – is this time actually wasted? These games can be relaxing and also complex. One would hope that some of them are tweaking a senior mind enough to avoid stagnation, or at the very least just a mellow distraction to the world at large. Is this Old People stuff? If I had done something different with those five days devoted to the dots game over the past couple of years, what would I or could I have done with that time instead?

Because you can look up anything on the internet these days, I asked what could be accomplished in a block of five days.

The first suggestion was to work on projects, as in writing a batch of blog posts. It actually said that! Ha! I wish! Thoughts roll around in my head at random and do not lend themselves to spilling out in batches.

One biggie was doing some serious decluttering, organizing room by room throughout the entire home. Well, that is a goal. Five days straight sounds a bit intense. The decluttering could segue into making upgrades and refreshing things within your living space – rearranging furniture or painting a room over a five day block.

The next suggestion was digital cleanup, which means backing up your files, dealing with your inbox, just cleaning out all the mess, unused apps, etc. Thinking about that gives me an uncomfortable, sinking sensation in my stomach. I am sure I would rather devote that time to puzzles.

On the health forefront, making and going to all your medical appointments was another suggestion. Coincidently, I just spent an entire week going to different medical specialists because you need a specialist for everything these days and all those annual checkups happened to fall at the same time, which was a rather exhausting experience. It seems you can’t always choose exactly when your checkups will be, as we have become unwilling captives to the medical practice calendars. My goal has been at least to avoid as many in the deepest of winter months as possible, since weather cancellations have plagued me in the past. Thus they have been lining up closer and closer together. Since I’ve already completed my five consecutive days of med appointment hell recently, I wonder if this will suffice.

Five days would be good for a road trip somewhere. The yearning for “Going Somewhere” has been playing strongly in my mind a whole lot lately. Anyone up for an adventure with me?

And what about all those movies and TV series that we stream? Can you imagine if you added all the time devoted to watching them? Of course I’m looking at it from the view of a retiree, which might lend a different slant to leisure time. Yet awakening in the middle of the night with the idea that “I Am Wasting Time” does has happened frequently enough to feel disturbing.

This past summer I had the opportunity to reunite with a very old friend who is an educated professional still working well into her seventies – not because she needs to but because she wants to. She asked me “So what do you do all day?” which was a bit triggering (see What Do You Do All Day? 11/20/13 for some poignant thoughts on that). Being a bit caught off guard and experiencing a mild wave of indignation (I’m retired, I can do whatever I want!) the first response that came to mind was “laundry.”

I do a lot of laundry, it’s true, and that is what I blurted out, partially as a joke, but yes, I do a whole lot of laundry – and I really don’t mind. But then she said “Oh – you’re a housewife”. And that slightly (okay, more than slightly) pushed my buttons. I can’t be totally sure but it did not appear to be said in a condescending or judgmental way, just kind of in a matter-of-fact way…..I think. There is nothing at all wrong with being a housewife at all. As a matter of fact, it is a lot of damn hard work to be a housewife (or a non-housewife, in this case) as anyone who is or has been one can attest to. And you don’t have to be a housewife to be a person who does a lot of laundry either. And (and, and, and) just for the record, I kind of enjoy doing laundry. But that statement raised a few questions about self-worth, social worth, and time management in general. So when Day #1031 showed up on my daily puzzle this morning, it opened up a little box of swirling stuff in my head that is not quite anxiety, not quite total dissatisfaction, but enough of something not quite named that sent me onto the internet to do some counterproductive retail therapy shopping.

When broken down to moments, a lot of time appears to be spent in observation, like admiring “The Three P’s” (pomegranate, pear and persimmon) in a bowl on the counter, and then taking a picture of it.

To burn off a little stress, I mowed the small front lawn off The Urban Porch, cut down some sunflowers and appreciated the flush of tiny wild asters which are suddenly blanketing the yard and appearing all over the neighborhood.

Walking down the street with my dog revealed the reappearance of the neighbor’s Fence Dinosaur, who had been taken down for repair and now wears a permanent eye patch due to being previously vandalized. He’s returned at the end of September in a raincoat

and wears an apple hat for October.

The kids on our street (and me) are glad for this little bit of whimsy.

While visiting a small local children’s zoo with a grandchild, I got lost in the patterns on the top of a Sulcata tortoise’s shell

and the striking layers of sapphire peacock feathers

A scattering of remaining Monarchs and Viceroys flutter among the late blooming Zinneas during a few sun-warmed daytime moments. We received a frost warning this morning – the last of the hummingbirds and butterflies should be migrating soon.

These things are small enjoyments and distractions, yet the nagging feeling that something bigger should be achieved remains. Some nights when I get in bed I think “Wow, the week has already ended.” Or more often than not, when I open my eyes in the morning I think “Here I am again.” (I guess that’s probably a good thing).

Because of 1031, I’m going to try to work a block of five days into this Fall with the focus of Accomplishment. Another goal is to approach those idle leisure moments sans guilt, because who really counts as judge and jury except myself?

~*~