The good thing about Saturdays is that if you want to you can to stay at home.  You don't have to get up before the sun. You don't have to make a little pot of coffee and slug it down before rushing out the door in an outfit that you hope matches.

Nope, on Saturdays you can do whatever you want.

Me for example?

I didn't set my alarm clock last night. So I slept in. Until 7:45am. But hey that's sleeping in when you normally get up at 5:45am. I read my emails, checked to see what the state of the world is on the NYT (not good in either Japan or Libya), bemoaned the fact that very shortly I'll have to buy a subscription to the electronic version of the newspaper and scanned facebook to see what my friends are up to (or alternately what I'm missing out on living abroad).

Between facebook and twitter it looks like most of my guy friends are obsessed with basketball and March Madness and that most of my single late twenty-something friends didn't get that into St Patrick's Day this year but those with babies dolled their kids up in green and shamrocks.

Then I figured I should do some life maintenance kind of things. By 9:30am I'd made a large pot of coffee, started a load of laundry, swept my apartment, done my dishes, put my books away, taken out the garbage and thought about cleaning my toilet. It's 10:30 or so right now and I've made a big dent in my pot of coffee, thrown together a half batch of banana oatmeal scones, set out some homework to grade and I am in the process of writing a blog post. The toilet? Well, I am still thinking about that. <!--more-->

And truth be told, grading homework is so low on my list of things to do I have a hunch that I'll clean the toilet before I sit down to grade. Yep. That's how much I want to grade. Cleaning the toilet seems better than grading.

All of this said, I'm just happy not to be working today as many Bulgarians are. Remember our four day weekend at the beginning of March? Well, now today is a work day to make up for the Friday that we were "given" as a part of the March holiday. Luckily my school isn't making me work on Saturday.

Me? I'll be working on Sunday. We're giving our entrance exam to nearly 400 7th grade students then. So I'll be at school by 7:45am on Sunday morning to proctor the exam. As an English speaker, I have a pretty limited role on Sunday. Seeing as we don't expect the kids to know English, all of the exam and directions are in Bulgarian. So for me, it's basically stroll in the park. I mean this almost literally. I'll be wearing comfy shoes and walking around the classroom for two and a half hours watching kids take a test that I can't even read.

Last year after the first hour, I wondered if I could say walk around the classroom doing lunges. That would be good exercise. But I decided that would be distracting and not very professional. So instead I practiced conjugating as many Bulgarian verbs as I could think of in my head.  I know a lot more verbs now so maybe I'll run through these again this year.

Anyhow, you really shouldn't feel bad for me because in exchange for proctoring the exam on Sunday, I get Monday off. That's not bad. Sure, it's kind of strange to have your weekend broken up over three days--Saturday and Monday--but at least I get two days off!!

So to everyone at work today, hope that you're having a great day and that you don't have too much work to do.