I stopped by to see Maria at work last weekend. She just started working at a shop called Treasures downtown. I had nothing better to do since it was near the end of the Thanksgiving holiday.

With several days off, Maria at work, and Bridget spending several days at my mother-in-law’s, I had lots of time to kill. Luckily, I have almost qualified for an advanced degree in wasting excess free time. I looked at the few days as a challenge, not a burden.

I did the things that I do best. I played video games. I practiced my guitar. I watched a few of my favorite “Leave it to Beaver” episodes.

I did actually accomplish some things, believe it or not. I did the dishes. Twice, I think I sorted through mail I hadn’t touched in a few weeks. I did one or two other important things, but I don’t really remember what they were.

When Maria and her co-workers asked me about my day last Saturday, I had trouble coming up with a lot of concrete examples of what I had done since she left for work six hours earlier. After thinking about it, I remembered my one big accomplishment that day.

I consolidated all the music I had stored on each of my computers.

For some reason, they didn’t get the importance of this job. They all looked at me as if I sat on the couch all day and twiddled my thumbs.

I tried to tell them that it took a lot of work. I had to take the portable hard drive from the basement computer and hook it up to the office computer upstairs. I had already made sure the files on the portable hard drive matched up with those on the laptop in the basement.

Then I had to figure out what songs I had only on the office computer and move them to the portable hard drive. After that, I had to figure out what songs I needed to move from the portable hard drive onto the office computer.

I was very busy. And that didn’t even take into account moving the portable hard drive back downstairs so I could transfer any music I found upstairs onto the laptop.

Do people realize how many times I had to click the mouse to get all this work done? And I don’t even want to begin to explain how stressful things got when the portable hard drive wouldn’t start up after I brought it upstairs. Thank God I noticed that the plug in the adapter had slipped a little out of place. If something had seriously gone wrong, I don’t know how the rest of my day would have went.

But I survived that terrible crisis and managed to get out for a while to visit my wife and her friends. I really don’t care if I don’t get the proper recognition for my hard work. My time will come.

I still need to synch up all my digital photos and other files. But that will have to wait for a while. I’m still recovering from this last job.