Is Stress Addictive?

Have you ever had so many things to do that, when you finally got a break, you couldn't figure out what to do with your sudden-found spare time?  That's where I find myself today.  For months now, every spare moment has been taken up with a task that needed doing ASAP, most of it involving things I needed to do for other family members.  Suddenly, we seem to be in the eye of the storm (the worst is yet to come, however), and things are so quiet today that I find myself wandering around wondering what I'm supposed to do next.  How sad is that?

I did spend an hour at B&N this morning, sitting in their coffee shop and proofing/editing a paper for someone who needs to turn it in tomorrow.  I went to B&N to do that hour's work just to get away from home because it seems there are more distractions here sometimes than there are sitting in the middle of a bookstore.  I have to confess, though, that three of my fellow patrons irritated the bejeezus out of me (on behalf of the bookstore) when they bought tiny cups of coffee before sitting down to trash several newspapers each while they sipped their coffee.  Don't these jerks realize that no one will buy the newspapers they wrinkle up, drip coffee on, and cram back on the racks?  Of course they do...they don't care.  Come on, B&N manager, are you really so desperate to get people into the store that you'll take a guaranteed loss on people like these?  You don't have to put up with that...just saying.

Now, I'm "multi-tasking" by watching the Astros game with the sound turned down low, reading what some of my favorite book bloggers have posted today, and doing my own muttering in this post...along with teaching my 8-year-old grandson how to work the DVD player in the play room.  The scary thing is that I feel as if I'm not accomplishing anything - and I'm wondering if I've become a stress junkie...that can't be good.

I'm going to get back to a couple of books sometime this afternoon, too.  One is the 800-something page George Washington biography that I'm reading for a blog book tour scheduled in mid-October.  That one is fascinating, to say the least.  I've learned more about Washington in the book's first 75 pages than I new going in, and I still have about 750 pages to go.  The best part is that the book is written in a very readable style, meaning that most of what I read sinks in on the first pass.  The other is a novel supposedly about the discovery of Pluto in 1930 - but it is more about the characters whose lives came together at, and around, the Arizona observatory responsible for the discovery.  I have very mixed emotions about this one so far and it only has 75 more pages to convince me, one way or the other, of its quality.

You know, I could learn to like Sundays like this one.