Most of the last few weeks I've been sitting in front of one of my many computers doing a number of tasks, but mostly job hunting. Then, when finished with my daily web rounds, I'd 'work' on any number of things - update copyright statements on my web sites, defrag my hard drives, make sure I had the latest OS patches, that kind of meaningless thing. Some of what I was doing was really significant stuff, like making sure my work search log is up to date for Texas Unemployment, if and when they choose to audit my job search activities. Most of what I was doing wasn't really all that productive or important. In fact, my increased idleness and increased intake of Caffeine-Free Dr. Pepper has added a few pounds to my not-so-small frame (like 20 pounds!)

Last week, my wife started her winter break, and she's been home with me during the day and will be until she returns to work in January. While her presence has increased my activity around the house, it wasn't until the last few days that I really got active again. on Saturday, we spent the day cleaning out the garage, and we're able to park both vehicles in the garage again, something that's only happened twice in the two years we've been in the house! Needless to say, we were both really, really tired, but I felt a definite sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. Sunday we cleaned up in the house and made dinner for my step-sister. Then yesterday, Monday, I got out in the garage again and made a few shelves for a storage cabinet so that we could put more of our games and my card collection in it. While I had all the woodworking tools out, I went ahead and made a small holder for our darts (we just put the dart board up and cannot find the old wall-mount dart holder we had in the last house) and mounted it on the wall. Again, at the end of the day, very tired, but a huge sense of accomplishment.

I should mention here that I'm not a skilled woodworker or carpenter by any means. In fact, I went through three designs on the dart holder before I came up with one that would work and not look totally crappy. But through the process, I was exercising a number of body parts that don't usually get exercised, including my brain. I was having to think in ways I haven't thought in a very long time. But even being able to finish a simple, but practical, project was very fulfilling. And, I realized, I wasn't in the kind of mental funk that I'd been in the last few weeks.

While I was trying to get back to sleep at one point this morning, I thought of the phrase "Idle hands are the devil's playthings." At least, that's the way I heard it when I was growing up. I Googled the first part of the phrase this morning and found that there are several common variations of the phrase:

• Idle hands are the devil's tools
  
• Idle hands are the devil's workshop
  
• Idle hands are the devil's playthings
  
• Idle hands beget the devil's work
  
• Idle hands make the devil's work
  
• Idle hands are the devil's play pen

The link above points to the GoEnglish.com Pocket Idiom Site for an explanation of the phrase, which is pretty succinct, but focuses mainly on children. The Google search resulted in a number of pages of opinions about the phrase variations and what, if anything, it means in our society today. Trust me, the whole gamut of opinions is out there. Only a few that I found actually extended the thinking beyond the realm of children, teenagers specifically. Many of the authors discussed the need to keep 'idle hands' busy with tasks so that the same hands are unable to find other, destructive things to do.

I think it's more than busywork that's needed. I think back to high school and college classes where instructors would assign busywork to fill up time in class. I recall any number of times that my mind would wander while performing the busywork, and boy could my mind be mischievous! Well, the same thing has been happening to me recently. I've been going through the same busywork in my job hunt, all the while my mind has had the freedom and room to go off and think on it's own topics. Instead of the mischievous antics of my high school and college days, my mind has wandered into more melancholy topics, and as a result, I've been bogged down in this mire of apathy.

But that wasn't the case this past weekend. Keeping my body physically active and my mind fully engaged on the tasks at hand has had all of my life energy focused on productive, constructive tasks, and kept my mind out of the bog of eternal stench. Now, I was in a funk of a different kind yesterday, which I may or may not discuss in a future entry, but my overall attitude was more positive, more outgoing, and definitely more hopeful. So as I move into the new year and the prospects of getting back to work soon, I'm not too worried about falling back into an idle state. I have several projects to get started that will fully occupy my being and scare off those idle hands.