(On my previous post on Shutdown Day, I said I was going to do this…
and it actually wasn’t too bad.)

The morning started out great: my perfect children allowed me to “sleep in” until the sun was almost up. I stumbled into the office to check the weather online but was confronted by a Red Hat-branded post-it that stated: “No Computer!” stuck in the middle of my monitor screen. Then my husband’s PDA alarm sounded—he had set an alarm to remind himself that it was Shutdown Day. (Is that cheating?)

After feeding my perfect children, I decided to take them to the Farmer’s Market, but I can never remember when the hours are, so went into the office…and turned around and decided to just climb in the car any way without checking the hours on the Internet. (Oh, right… “Shutdown Day!”) And you know—it worked out just fine! We went and it was open.

After coming home, I wandered by the office, intending on checking my email, and to see if my latest article had been accepted at Associated Content, and how many pennies I had made at Helium, and then I remembered: Oh, right… “Shutdown Day!” Hmmm…so I decided instead to get a little work done around the house.

We painted the Master bathroom. Fertilized the yard. Pruned the shrubbery. I read the second book in Asimov’s Foundation series. And a couple magazines. We went out for dinner. And ice cream afterwards. We came home at a reasonable hour, bathed the perfect children, and got them to bed on time. All thanks to Shutdown Day.

Since this experience with Shutdown Day, I wonder how much of the day we spend “saving time” by looking things up on the computer? I cannot believe all the things I got done in only one Saturday. And I might actually use the egg timer we set to limit the kids screen time for myself the next time I need to “quickly” look something up.

BTW, Shutdown Day’s official website, was going to list how many people actually committed to shutdown their computers, but their website said: “We enjoyed our day without our computers so much that we decided to take Sunday off too! We’ll be back online on Monday.” I actually did not get around to signing up, but did it anyway, so I guess I compensated for someone who could not stand to abstain.