Some days, it doesn't pay to get out of bed.  I used to hear that a lot and I always wondered if it were true.  It might be age, it might be the season, being pre-Spring and all, and it just might be my irritating sunny disposition, but I think life pays to get out of bed even if you only have an unremarkable day to show for yourself at the end of the day.

Friday was an unremarkable day.  I tapped the snooze button on my phone alarm and had every intention of going back to sleep for 10 minutes but ended up checking my mail, my Facebook account, my Twitter feed, the New York Times app, the weather, and LinkedIn just to see what was waiting for me.  No extra sleep, but I felt that I had actually multi-tasked enough to be ahead of the game.

I found my girls had made coffee but it smelled like hazelnut so I made a Nespresso and toasted an unfrosted strawberry Pop Tart and sat down to watch the Today Show.  The Today Show gang has not been the same since they relieved Ann Curry of her NBC contract, so I swap back and forth to MSNBC and CNN to compare newsy bits and then take a shower.  I am out the door a few mintues later to catch my buses to my office.

Everyone was predicting snow but I grew up in Michigan so I didn't pay any attention.  I spent the morning in my office working on a spreadsheet that's due the end of next week and when folks got chatty outside my door, I cranked up my favorite banjo music and smiled.  I cannot complain if it's going to snow and I have banjo music.  Things went well with the spread so I met a good friend at lunch time and we talked for the longest time about some office things before I stopped into a local Chinese place for fried rice.

In the afternoon, I was able to finish the spreadsheet to the point where I could move into the next phase of the project, confirming that all the data is correct, so I turned back on the banjo radio station and kept at it until a very friendly tech guy came in to help me restore all my recently lost E-mail archives.  For some reason, last Thursday, all my saved 2012 messages went down the proverbial E-drain.  I got them back and now I have no excuse for not answering lots of questions, like "what did he say he wanted to teach?" Or, "when did she say she wanted to take that course off?"  Piecing together next year's curriculum at a university is a pretty complicated exercise and I will still be cleaning it up next week.

But looking back now at these small accomplishments, I have to recognize that even though this was a truly unremarkable day, I did quite a bit and I should acknowledge that.  I got up on time, I was able to make my own breakfast, I had hot water for my shower, and I caught my two buses safely.  That's not bad.  Then, I worked in a safe, heated office with my friends and colleagues only a phone call away, I was able to listen to my banjo music and I didn't spill anything into my keyboard.  That's not bad either.  And wonder of wonders, it turned out I had backed up the E-mails to my external hard drive correctly and there they were, hiding, but safe and sound just waiting to go back home to my E-mail account.

I am not sure if I need to make a real point here, but it would probably look something like this:  if you can sleep in a safe place, have enough to eat, work in a safe place, and have friends who will listen to you, it probably wasn't an unremarkable day, all in all.  I came home and my son made me dinner.  That was enough to move this unremarkable day into the misty realm of a great day.

Crossposted on Open Salon