Is too much of a good thing TOO much?

So here is the question...can you get too much of a good thing? Is too much chocolate, too much? Is too much sleep, too much? Is too much exercise, too much? Is too much chips and salsa, too much? Is too much money too much...wait that one is stupid, of course not! When do you pass the limit of having a good thing be good and then when a good thing goes bad? I have had an inordinate amount of time to ponder on the pro's and con's of this thought lately and I have come to the conclusion that you can ABSOLUTELY have too much of a good thing!

I remember when I was a Sophomore in High School, I had a teacher teaching the concept of diminishing return. He asked for a volunteer who loved marshmallows and to my great fortune, I was chosen to participate in the study. He handed me a jumbo mallow and after I took a bite into it I was to describe it to the class. I did my best to describe a marshmallow and used words like, delicious, creamy, soft, etc. Then he kept handing them to me...one after another...until I reached like 10 mallows. I wanted to vomit!!! I learned that day a lesson I never have forgotten about the point at which something very desirable hits the undesirable factor.

Why the thought you ask? I am a person, as you know, that likes to be busy. I thrive on it. But right now I am in a lull and I don't know what to do with down time. I know what you are thinking...I would kill for that. I know...I look at all my very busy friends and family right now and you would love to have the same problem. I know what it sounds like. I appreciate that many of you don't realize that you can actually be very bored when you have too much time to yourself, but it is true. So here is what I have been doing.

The kids left for EFY on Monday...Mike, who after being gone an a very exotic two week European "work" thing, came home for 54 hours until he left again for NYC on Monday. I KNOW what you are thinking...AWESOME. No cooking (not that I did too much of that), no one demanding anything of you, no one to see how you spend too much time doing those guilty pleasures like playing Bejeweled for an hour or watching hours of TV. And it is awesome...for a while, but then it isn't. Let's see, cleaned Victoria's room from packing nightmare on Sunday, check, dead-headed all my containers, check, weeded the beds, check, played Guitar Hero so I can beat Justin when he comes home, check, caught up on interesting Tivo, check....ate alone at kitchen, check, talked to the dogs about other dogs in the hood, check, stayed up as late as possible so I didn't have to think about being all alone, check. See..after a while you run out of all the fun things that you dream of doing when you have this life of leisure...too much is too much. It was so bad that today I actually took the stool sample for Chloe's vet into the office. Yes, I had enough time to collect the sample, make a plan to return it to the vet, and then carry out the task of taking the poop into the vet. I also engaged an old man in the gym in a conversation about his knees...how he used to play handball in the army in Japan, then played racquetball in Germany because no one played handball, then played tennis when he came back to the States. Then you know it is sad, when you get a solicitor call and you actually hear them out for a while before hanging up on them.

The funny thing is (and I will let all of you know since you are too busy to ever get to this point), that eventually when you get the major things off your to-do-list, you get to the "sediment" chores. The ones that you really know you need to do but are really the yucky un-fun chores that you really have a hard time motivating yourself to do, so you sit around, doing nothing, looking at the blank squares on your calendar. Don't be sad for me, I'm living the life!! As much as I may gripe, I don't want a lot of something, just a little bit of something. So on my to-do-list today, "Write blog"...check.

By the way, I am available for lunch.