Hello Everyone and welcome to 2016. Sure, we've been here for 18 days already, but better late than never. ;)
The year started on a good note (for me at least, and I hope for you as well) as January 1st landed on a Friday and I was at home in Northern California with my family (in the illustrious Volcano, CA - look it up if you've never heard of it before. I swear, Wikipedia does have an entry for it.). Three glorious days into 2016 before I had to return to work and everyday life. Honestly, I was pretty ok with returning to my usual routine, but I had a lingering sense of disappointment that the first holiday for Nike wasn't until sometime in May. No three day weekends coming up for me. At least, that is what I believed...
You see, in preparation for the coming year and during a time of flight deals with Southwest, I had looked at Nike's 2016 holiday schedule to try to plan out some trips to visit family well in advance. And I vaguely remembered that there were no holidays for quite some time. Certainly Nike was not giving me Martin Luther King Jr. Day free (which I considered a huge oversight as it is a very important holiday). I won't deny that I felt a little disgruntlement about that. And so, I got up this morning at my customary 5:15 am, got ready and headed off to Beaverton for my morning hot yoga class. Class was amazing, as always, (if you haven't tried yoga, hot or cold, I highly recommend it) and after getting ready for work at the studio I headed over to Nike to start my day.
I drove into the usually somewhat crowded parking lot at 7:30 am and found it suspiciously empty. I began to have an inkling that something was off here. Was everyone late? Was there a lot of traffic on every road to Nike even though I hadn't encountered anything of the kind? Was everyone else crazy? Or (and I was beginning to suspect this might be the more rational question) was it just me? Being the cautious type, however, I decided to check it out. I parked, gathered my bag and my laptop, put on my coat and headed toward the front doors. Which were locked. Locked up nice and tight. Yup. Nike had given us the day off. I just hadn't realized when I looked at the schedule because it was in January and I was looking for free days in later months of the year as a January holiday was too close to my recent Christmas/New Years visit to warrant a return trip. Whoops!
Now, many of you are probably now laughing (and I'm going to assume it's with me rather than at me 'cause that makes me feel a bit better), but in my defense...in my defense...eh, forget it. I have no defense. Haha! But this small faux pas did give me one great gift - the glory of an unexpected free day. The best kind of day you can hope for. Most of the time a three day weekend is taken up in some way with activities meant to maximize the free time. I travel to friends or family or they travel to me. I have extra errands to get done. I spend all day reading in bed, consumed to the point of even forgetting to eat. (I am a bookworm, after all. What else would you expect?) But today I was give the great gift of having an unexpected free day. The world was my oyster and I was up early enough to appreciate it. The lazing period had already passed and my assumption that I had work meant that it was entirely mine.
If you've never been given the gift of an unexpected free day, it's really too bad. There's nothing better. So long as you totally commit to it. Today I got a special breakfast, took a midmorning nap with my cat, went to see a movie in the theater ("The Big Short" is a fantastic movie, by the way), read away the afternoon in Barnes & Noble (a definite happy place of mine) and am now trying to decide what to do with my evening. It's a wonderful feeling. Today has been about doing whatever I want and what I wanted was fun. I must say, "Mission Accomplished."
I hope your Martin Luther King Jr. Day was equally amazing and that you made the most of it. And if you find yourself in the position of ever having an unexpected free day in the future, be sure to make the most of it. They don't come along nearly often enough.
