The hardest thing I’ve ever done is spend a day doing nothing. Today, with the auditor here for nearly three hours, I had no choice. He was sprawled out (or rather, his laptop and papers were sprawled) over my entire workspace, and all I could do was sit quietly at the computer and pretend to be busy while he copied the lines of numbers I’d given to him.

I couldn’t talk, and I even had to cut short some phone calls I really wanted to take. I couldn’t move around, because he was pretty much in the way, like the elephant in the punch bowl (or however that goes). Besides, I’d cleared off all my own work and piled it on the bed, out of sight, so he could have the space. I just didn’t think it would take most of the day, or be so exhausting.

So I caught up on a few journals, and cleaned up about half of the dead links on my Links page. I’ll get to the rest of those next audit, I guess. Some I kept around for old times’ sake, since I don’t know that anyone else uses that page the same way I do. It was hard to concentrate on anything that would have been more productive, so I didn’t even try.

And when he left, a little after four in the afternoon, I kept on not trying. I was ready for a nap and a cookie, and just to show how worn out I was from all this doing of the nothing: I took the nap first.

In olden times when I worked in a shoe store, the days with no customers were the hardest to recover from. I could run around all day during back-to-school season, up and down ladders and back and for the from the stockroom, and never be half as tired as I’d be after a day in the middle of June when no customer came through the gate all day. That’s what I felt like today.