Not My Typically 4th Of July (or Taking Advantage Of A Day Off)

For the past several years, I’ve gone to the same 4th of July party that my friends throw. I usually make drunk fruit, have a lot of fun with my friends, spend the day just hanging out, and watching some fireworks. I love having a casual 4th of July celebration and don’t feel like I need to have some crazy adventure that day, especially when it’s in the middle of the week so I have to work early the next day.

This year, my friends didn’t have a party. They have a puppy that is still young and timid and they didn’t know how she would react to the fireworks. I completely understand this and I think everyone wanted them to be able to stay home and keep a close watch on their dog since so many dogs freak out and run off because of the noise. While I did miss having the party that I love going to each year, I’m glad they were able to keep their puppy safe. I think everyone felt the same way.

But since I didn’t have my usual party to go to, I had to figure out what else I wanted to do that day. I wasn’t feeling too motivated to make plans and a lot of my friends felt the same way. We talked about maybe trying to figure out a way to watch fireworks somewhere, but nothing was really planned and we all said we’d check in the day of to see what we felt like doing.

The morning of the 4th I tried to take advantage of having a day off and sleep in. But because I am so used to my sleep schedule I wasn’t able to sleep in too much. I think I maybe slept 20 minutes later than normal, but I did stay in bed much longer and had a lazy morning reading and relaxing. Then I decided to take advantage of having nothing to do all day and work on a big cleaning of my house.

I was in the middle of cleaning my bathroom when suddenly the room felt like it was spinning. I have a history of vertigo and just thought I was having an episode. I thought maybe the smells from the cleaning supplies triggered it or I was dealing with low blood sugar. Then I noticed the things hanging on hooks in my bathroom were swaying back and forth and realized we were having an earthquake! I sat down on the edge of my bathtub to wait for it to stop since I didn’t want to run through my house to get under a table while things might be falling. It was a very large earthquake, but far from my house so it wasn’t too strong where I live. But it was still a scary moment since we never know when an earthquake will start easy and then get bigger. We actually had a larger earthquake on the 5th which made me worry too.

After the earthquake, I had to do a little unexpected cleaning because a few things did fall over. My DVD collection tipped over so I had to reorganize that (and it made me start to think about getting rid of the DVDs) but that was the only issue after the earthquake. So once I cleaned that up I went back to my regular cleaning like vacuuming and mopping. I know, I’m so interesting and fun spending my day off and a holiday cleaning.

Once the cleaning was done, I decided to see if any of my friends ended up making a plan to do anything that night. We were all in the same mindset with not feeling motivated to go out and do something. I don’t know if it was because of the earthquake, the weird weather we’ve been having, or we all were just tired. But nobody (including myself) really felt like trying to make a plan just to see fireworks. I’m glad we were all in agreement so nobody felt like they had to do something and we all just spent the evening on our own.

I did some more reading and watched a bunch of random tv. I tried to get to bed at a reasonable time since I had an early morning the next day but I still ended up going to sleep a bit later than I would have wanted to. Plus, there were illegal fireworks going off in my neighborhood throughout the night keeping me awake. There were so many illegal fireworks that I doubt the police could really enforce the law. It was annoying, especially when they were still shooting them off after midnight. I think it ended around 1:30 am when I finally got to sleep.

I’m sure that I could have gone out and had a fun 4th of July, but I had a perfectly fine day off at home doing boring things. I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything even though I do love getting to see my friends at parties. I am in a place in my life where I can be happy being a bit of a hermit and doing what is the responsible thing to do over the fun thing to do. Plus, I did get a lot of stuff done around my house that I needed to do and I didn’t have to worry about it over the weekend, so that was a win for me. But maybe next year, the party I usually go to will happen and then I’ll have easy plans that don’t require me to do much organizing and planning to take advantage of them.

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