The hard part about Saturdays is that I have to make a decision. There are so many ways to go, and it comes just once a week, so it's important to choose wisely.

The right and proper thing to do would be to get all the work done that I didn't get to during the week. It's a perfect chance to plow through all those stubborn spreadsheets without being interrupted by the phone. If I'd gone this way, I could be announcing that I'm ready to send everything to the accountant and be done with my part of it.

That wasn't how I spent my Saturday, though.

Another possibility was to get caught up on all the tedious chores that I find excuses to neglect all week. There are always piles of papers to be dealt with, windows that could stand washing, about an acre of white carpeting that isn't remotely white. Then there's the bathroom, but let's not go there. Trust me on that.

Of all those jobs, I tackled exactly none today. It was much too fine a day to stay in and swab out the moldy tub.

If I hadn't slept so late this morning, I might have managed all of the above. It's hard not to waste half of a Saturday when your Friday night ends so late. I just couldn't pick myself up off the couch and go to bed, not with all those movie channels lined up, and a universal remote control at hand.

I went up and down the listings, mostly watching the ends of movies I've already seen. Author! Author!. The Fringe Dwellers. And the exquisite last half hour of The Sixth Sense, which no matter how many times I've seen it (and it's a lot) still brings a chill to my spine and tears to my cheeks. Every time.

So that brings us to Saturday. I still have errands to run in the mornings, any day the post office is open. There's a big check out there with the Company's name on it, and getting it would make it a whole lot easier to answer the phone next week. Instead of telling people we're expecting the funds in any day, I can tell them the check's in the mail. And it'll be the truth!

So I went to the post office and found nothing of interest in the box. I took Mom to buy some gold spray paint (just to retouch something; she's not a tagger, although some of the graffiti I see looks as if it could have been painted by a one-eyed woman in her seventies). We stopped by Suzanne's to interrupt her gardening for awhile, and then I came home and still had to decide how to spend the rest of the day.

It was really the weather that decided it for me. I couldn't bring myself to stay indoors and pound the keyboard or scrub porcelain, so I dragged out the gardening gloves and went to work in the sun.

This gardening is a frustrating business for a rank amateur like me. I don't know what I'm doing, and sometimes I get the idea that I should just rip out everything and start over again with plain brown dirt. That way I wouldn't have to tiptoe through the tulips to get to the weeds that are choking all the more desirable plants.

And I'll never get all the weeds up anyway, no matter how much time I put in. I was out there for hours, and you can't tell the difference. I can, but you couldn't. It still looks neglected and overgrown. I tried to get to the stuff just inside the front fence, the first thing anyone sees as they come to the front door. But it still doesn't look manicured or cultivated.

On the other hand, I don't have that many visitors. It looks better to me, and I'm the one who spends so much time staring out the window at it.

I filled the yard waste container up halfway with what I did today. That leaves a lot that can be done between now and Thursday night, when it goes out to the curb again. I didn't want to have all the fun in one day, when we're supposed to see the sun every day for awhile.

So that's how this particular Saturday went. Next week, I'll have to decide all over again. I might regret not working on the financial reports, since they still have to be done. My rug is still dirty, and so are the dishes in the sink, not to mention the sink itself. But I got more satisfaction out of what I did today than I would have if I'd done what I "should" have done.