Out of My Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

work. Shopping, of course, is the number one time-spending amusement in the country.
    To say, “I’ve got to go to the store” or “I should do the shopping” makes it sound like work, which it isn’t. Shopping is almost always an excuse for getting out of the house and away from the work you ought to be doing.
    The best jobs to do are ones that look hard but aren’t because you get more credit for doing those. I don’t want to alienate women who do a lot of it, but vacuuming is imitation hard work. There is nothing in any way difficult about rolling a roaring wind machine around a room on its
little wheels. The noise it makes seems unnecessary but adds to the suggestion that it’s work.
    The only hard part of vacuuming the living room rug is putting the damned vacuum back in the closet when you’ve finished. Vacuum cleaners are unwieldy. If he invented them, Hoover stopped too soon.
    Washing the car in the driveway on a spring or summer day is another job that has the reputation of being hard but isn’t. The only hard part of washing the average car is getting to the middle of the windshield with a sponge or cloth without getting your shirt and pants wet where you lean up against the car.
    This morning, something happened to the computer on which I write. Finally, after a frustrating hour, I called for assistance and the technician came to fix it.
    In an effort to help, I brought in a small lamp and put it on the desk near the computer. As I plugged it in, there was that familiar flash indicating the bulb had blown. I went to the closet, came back with a new bulb and screwed it in until it was snug. The bulb glowed. At last, a job I knew how to do: changing a light bulb.

SOME THOUGHTS ON VACATIONS
    Taking a vacation isn’t easy. There are all sorts of ways to do it wrong and I suspect that a lot of you make a mess of your vacation.
    First, we all ought to face the fact that planning a vacation is more fun, more satisfying and more restful than actually taking one. It’s certainly less expensive. Looking forward to a good vacation is one of the great pleasures of life, yet very few of us can say that about actually being on vacation.
    In the first place, planning a vacation doesn’t cost anything. Nothing goes wrong when you’re planning. There are no endless hours of driving, no lines at the airport, no unexpected expenses, no rainy days to endure when you’re in the planning stages.

    I am something of an expert on ruining a vacation because I’ve done it often.
    I know what’s wrong, but I can’t correct my mistake. I have made one of the basic vacation errors. I try to do too many things in too many different places.
    Cramming it full is not the way to take a vacation. The things I planned all seemed good to me when I was thinking about them, but now that I’m halfway into my month off, I realize I’m not having a lot of fun or getting much rest because I keep going someplace. Wherever I am, I decide to pick up and go somewhere else.
    The places I go all look good from a distance but once I get there, they’re pretty much like where I came from but with different people and a different, unfamiliar bed to sleep in. I know now that I should have gone to a nice house we have in the country and stayed there. I shouldn’t have done a lot of moving around. It might have been a good idea to have had the telephone disconnected but I’m too insecure for that. I’m afraid no one would have called me and I’d never have known they hadn’t.
    I’m already planning next year’s vacation while I’m still on this one. I know what I’m going to do. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay home, go to bed early, get up when I feel like getting up, watch some latenight television, eat what I feel like eating with no regard for the diet advice everyone is shoving down our throats in books and magazine