Celebrate the Independence of Your Nation by Blowing Up a Small Part of It

It's the end of a long weekend, and I feel I haven't accomplished anything. Not that I really have to, but I always feel that extra days off will mean time to do stuff I've been putting off, but I'm pretty much always too tired. I often find that writing is something I either feel like doing or don't, and that's not something I could get away with if I did it professionally, but I'm not. My bigger concern is that I have so many partially planned stories and such, and they're not of much use to anyone unless I can work them into a readable form. I also have a lot of cleaning up to do around the apartment, but at least writing is usually fun. Long weekends also tend to make me even more stressed about having to go back to work, although it's not usually that bad when I get there. It's just having things hanging over my head that makes me uncomfortable. Last month, I saw some comments from members of Congress about how they didn't want to make Juneteenth a federal holiday because we had too many already. It's certainly possible that this was just a way to imply they were racist without actually saying it, but it's ridiculous anyway because I figure we have way too few. With Juneteenth specifically, I can see it not being fair to give white people the day off, but at my workplace, it wasn't a holiday for anyone. A lot of people don't get many of these days off at all anyway. Federal holidays are so weirdly spaced, too. We have Christmas and New Year's a week apart, but nothing at all in August?


We had other plans for this weekend that didn't work out either. We went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden after work on Friday, and were intending to go to Playland on Sunday, but Beth didn't feel up to it. I'm okay staying home most of the time, but I also think there are things we should do before the summer ends, and it's already July. We're considering trips to Knoebels, Dorney Park, and Kennywood as well. We did go to the crowded boardwalk on Coney Island to see the fireworks, though. I noticed a difference from when I used to see fireworks back where I grew up in that those usually started out slowly, just one at a time, and then they'd shoot off all the leftover ones at the end. The Coney Island ones were pretty fast from the beginning. Of course, they do generally have fireworks every weekend in the summer, so it's not as special an occasion, I suppose. And I did beat the Fire Vellumental in Paper Mario: The Origami King and reached Venus' world in Final Fantasy Legend II, so I guess those are accomplishments, right? I realize they're really not in the grand scheme of things, but they kind of feel like it at the time, and very little in real life does.