Procrastination

I’ve had a lovely weekend as a result of procrastination. An online assessment for my OU course opened on Friday night and I planned to finish it before the weekend was done. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans...

We picked Gemma up from the airport on Friday night and, although she was shattered, she talked non-stop from the moment she got in the car till the moment she went to bed. She was up early on Saturday morning and, just as I was about to make a start on my assessment, Gemma started to chat again. Now, how irresponsible would I be as a mother if I didn’t spend some quality time with my daughter before she headed back to Uni? So, laptop was snapped shut and and that was Saturday morning’s course work out the window!

Gemma talked herself to sleep by lunchtime so I made a cuppa and fired up the computer again. Just as I was about to start, Ross reminded me that he’d been emailed the lease documents for his Uni accommodation and that they required checking over and signing. We finished doing that then, just as I was about to make a start on the assessment, Alex arrived home from work. How rotten would it have been not to spend some time with my wonderful hubbie when he’s come in from a hard morning’s work? So, I obviously had to sit down for a cuppa and blether with him.  And that was Saturday afternoon’s course work taken care of.

Later on, we took Gemma up to St Andrews (as her car’s still not fixed) and met up with Tola, Gemma’s lovely boyfriend, and Oyinkan, Gemma’s lovely best friend, for dinner. St Andrews is such a nice wee town and it was a great place to be on Saturday night. It still strikes me as funny when I think back to my perception of St Andrews before Gemma became a student there. When I was little, St Andrews was a nice place to go holidays in our wee caravan and I remember it having the best ice cream ever from a cafe called Janetta’s. When I was at school, I thought of St Andrews as the place where all the toffs went to Uni and where rich Americans played golf. When I was at Uni, St Andrews was one of the places to go on a road trip and have a drunken barbeque on the beach. When the kids were little, St Andrews was a great, safe place for my mum to take her brood of grandchildren for a wee break away from their parents. Years later, I realise that St Andrews is still all of those things, but I also know that it’s not only toffs that go to St Andrews Uni (though there are a fair few!) or our Gemma definitely wouldn’t be there!

So, that was Saturday night out. Oh, and I should mention the drive back – absolutely gorgeous skies surrounded us the whole road back home. A perfect end to a lovely day.

It was a toss-up on Sunday morning between a) doing the OU assignment, b) watching the London marathon on the telly and c) sunbathing. My middle name is Rose – quite apt really as, when the sun comes out my head turns towards it! So, c) won – with regular updates on the progress of the marathon from Alex before he headed off to Grangemouth Stadium to compete in the Scottish Athletics Men’s League. Alex loves competing for his club and, as one of the, ahem, older generation of athletes, he’s always delighted when he’s selected to compete on the track. Because not many of the younger athletes are daft enough to do the steeplechase, it’s the event that Alex is most commonly asked to do at the league matches and, although he wasn’t happy with his time yesterday, he came in 3^rd and picked up valuable points for the club. My hero! I don’t like watching Alex running round the track umpteen times, jumping over big hurdles and a big pool of water as I’m always worried he’ll do himself an injury, so I stayed at home to do my assessment.  

However, instead of knuckling down, I decided it was far more important to spend some quality time with my mum - so I picked her up and took her to Dobbies for a donner and a scone. Isn’t it funny; the first sign of real sunshine and the garden centres are heaving? I did what I always do on my first visit of the year to the garden centre; bought a load of wee plants, got home, planted some of them and left some of them ‘till later’. Just like every other year, those wee pansies in the almost-empty black tray will never get planted; they’ll dry out and die and Alex will say ‘What a waste of bloody money!’.

Then, it was such a lovely evening. I couldn’t possibly consider sitting inside in front of the computer – you just never know how long this nice weather’s going to last and we really have to make the most of it! So, we had a barbeque, by the finish of which it was far too late to start any kind of studying. And, anyway, Gordon – whom I’d hardly seen all weekend as he’d been away at one thing then another – suggested settling down for a family movie. Ah well, there was always tomorrow.

And, indeed, tomorrow turned out to be the day that the procrastination stopped! This morning I got up early, got my work work out of the way, opened the online assignment, got stuck in and managed to complete it in a couple of hours. It turned out not to be too difficult and it left me wondering, as usual, why I was putting off doing it. Sometimes procrastination can result in a load of stress because something’s been left till the last minute but, fortunately, my procrastination over the weekend resulted in me having a thoroughly enjoyable couple of days – not doing anything wildly exciting, but just enjoying what and who I have round about me. If only procrastination always produced such a good result....