extra day

Today, for the first (but hopefully not the last) time, I'm going to fly over the International Date Line. I've never given it much thought before now; an arbitrary line drawn somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn't have a lot to do with my day-to-day life. But in just a few hours, we're going to wing our way across it, landing in LAX, magically, before we ever left Fiji.

Today, I get an extra day.

Before you start in with all your logical, rational explanations about how I'm not really gaining those hours, how all the traveling across time zones we've done is only now catching up with us, I just want you to think about it for a minute. What if you actually did get an extra day instead of just arriving, bleary-eyed and disoriented, at an airport where all that mattered was finding your next gate? Put aside what seemed obvious to me at first, the ingenious idea to cross the line over and over, thus amassing weeks on end of free time to be frittered away as you please; even I can see the holes in that plan.

Let's just say you get this one day. It's not just the clock turning back this time, like when you cross into a new time zone. The whole calendar has shifted back one page, and there's this extra twenty-four hours just begging to be filled. What would you do with it? If you didn't have to spend it on a plane and waste it on jet lag and overpriced airport food, how would you spend an extra day?

I don't know what I'm going to do with mine. For now, I think I'll just tuck it away, hold it in reserve for sometime in the future when I'm tired and stressed and there just isn't enough time. (Not that I ever feel that way. I'm super-nurse and super-wife and super-missionary, didn't you know? This is clearly hypothetical.) I started making a to-do list for when we get back to the States (which is in less than two weeks, somehow), and I get the feeling I might need my extra hours sooner than I thought...