An Anything Day without movies

Is the pandemic still going on? Yes.

So was it time for another Anything Day in our household yesterday? Yes.

If you recall from this post, "Anything Day" was a coping strategy we devised to allow ourselves to blow off a little steam while also staying here at home. All four members of our family were allowed to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, as long as they also ate meals and brushed their teeth, and their definition of "anything" wasn't outside the bounds of what they're normally allowed to do, or conflicted with anyone else's idea of "anything." The first installment was three weekends ago.

You might ask "Do you need an Anything Day again so soon, Vance?" The answer is, probably not. But, the week is a grind with the kids schooling from home and needing a lot of hand-holding. The deciding factor, though, is that May 11th has been floated as a possible date for lifting some restrictions here in Victoria. Given that my wife is getting her own sort of Anything Day next Sunday for Mother's Day, this could be the last chance for a while for my kids and me.

Last time, I watched five movies. Two of them were hijacked by my kids. That's not really fair; I invited them to watch movies with me. But when they took me up on the offer, I realized it wasn't exactly what I thought I'd wanted.

So this time, I was going to do something different. Maybe one movie in the afternoon and one in the evening. I wanted Anything Day to truly take me wherever it naturally took me.

And that was: no movies at all.

See, I've had a steady diet of movies during the pandemic. To be honest, it's not all that different from my normal pace. When I go out at night during normal times, it's more often to see a movie than to get together with friends. That's because I'd see at least one movie a week, and for a 46-year-old dad, seeing friends that often is just not that common a thing. (At least, I assume it isn't; I have only my own experience to go on.) So instead of seeing my movie out, I'm seeing my movie at home, and then still seeing a movie on most other nights of the week as well.

So seeing movies is not "doing anything" in the most creative, the most truly different interpretation of that theme.

What did I do instead? Well, I'm about to tell you. And my accompanying artwork has already shown you. And indeed, it was perhaps the purest definition of Anything Day one could possibly imagine.

Playing Lexulous is not exactly a unique experience for me either. I've about doubled my normal number of games during the pandemic, but probably really more than that, since one of the two people I hadn't been playing previously is playing me in three games at once.

But playing Lexulous against myself? That's new.

See, I discovered -- because they advertised it with a banner above one of my games -- that Lexulous has a new practice area where you can play either against the computer, or against yourself. How do you play against yourself, you ask? Well, you just play all the letters in the game, dumped into your rack successively until they are all gone. Which means you also get all the points.

Your opponent? The clock.

That's right, you can set your game to last a certain amount of time, or leave it untimed if you want. I tried three minutes and that was way too short. I tried 15 minutes and that was too long. But ten minutes was just about perfect. It's long enough to be forced to make up your mind quickly, but to allow yourself a little time to think if you've budgeted your time well and have a promising rack.

If you run out of time, you lose.

Of course, you still lose any time you don't beat your own personal record. Which I started keeping track of sometime after about 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning.

I scored 721 combined points in the first game. The first game I started keeping track of, anyway, which was probably about the third game overall.

Do you know how long it took me to score more than 721 points?

Sixteen more games.

And since each game is ten minutes long, that meant I spent the next two hours and forty minutes trying to beat my score. And it was actually more like three+ hours, because there were a couple games in there where I didn't finish in time, so I didn't enter them into the special Excel spreadsheet I had created just for the occasion.

Including lunch and the like, it was 3 in the afternoon the next time I looked up.

Was beating my score once enough? Oh no. Oh no it was not.

Before I went to bed last night, over the course of the rest of the day, I played another -- and how's this for symmetry -- 16 games.

The funny thing was, I beat my new high score of 752 with a new high score of 785 in the very next game after I got the 752. I got over 700 a number of other times, but the closest I came to beating it again was in the very next game after that, when I got 776. (Until this morning, when I got 778 on my first, and so far only, try.)

I thought the rest of my family -- or, I should say, my wife, who was the only one paying attention to what I was doing -- would think I was crazy. But she didn't, not at all. In fact, she thought it was great. The point of Anything Day is to go down a rabbit hole if you want, because you have the time. You just do you. For one day.

I did have moments when I wondered if I were frittering away my Anything Day. Hadn't I wanted to watch that one movie in the afternoon and that one in the evening?

But movies were the easy thing to give up. There were other things I imagined myself doing more of. Like, I read only about ten pages in my book.

Still, on Anything Day I also:

- Worked on our 1000-piece Sherlock Holmes puzzle for at least an hour
- Watched five (30-minute) episodes of the Christina Applegate-Linda Cardellini Netflix show Dead to Me, in order to be ready for season 2 to drop on Friday
- Watched this week's episode of Survivor
- Wrote yesterday's blog post
- Did a fair bit of Facebooking
- Ate some meals
- Took a very short nap in our garage

A movie did get watched in our house actually. My older son couldn't be taken away from his Fortnite, but the younger one and my wife started watching Smallfoot at about 6:30, eating the pizza we ordered in front of the TV. And as much as I would have liked to watch the movie that inspired the Zendaya is Meechee meme, I was happily in the adjoining room, eating my own share of the pizza and trying to solve our Sherlock Holmes puzzle.

After all, sometimes Anything Day means no movies at all.