After a long day at work teaching 184 teenagers (I’m also a high school English teacher), I come home and do one of the things I love to do most—write. But there are times when my mind is either so fried or spinning a million miles a minutes that I need to relax, to do something absolutely mindless, something that takes little mental effort and helps me unwind.
Here are those five things:
- Watch Law and Order It doesn’t matter if it’s the original series, Criminal Intent, or Special Victims’ Unit, I’ve seen them all more than once but still enjoy watching them. At any time of the day, it seems like I can find one on satellite TV on an upper channel. Since I know how the show ends, I can zone out or even catch a few Zs without feeling like I need to give the program one-hundred percent of my attention.
- Play Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery on my phone. I downloaded the app a month ago. I play in short bursts, since I wait for my wand to reload instead of paying for energy, but tapping my screen and answering Hogwarts-related questions gives me a simple satisfaction that takes the edge off a busy day.
- Fold socks. Yes. It’s boring chore, but it’s a no-brainer, and I can do it while watching Law and Order. Lol. Socks go from my dryer to a plastic laundry basket, and when I need to veg for a while, I fold them, rolling the pair together and flipping the top of one over to cover both. There are many ways to fold socks, and I know my method is a no-no for many because it stretches them, but it’s the way I do it.
- Clean out my purse. It’s another no-effort task, but by the end of the week, my handbag is a hot mess of crumpled receipts and hand-written notes containing book ideas. The job is quick and easy, but the sense of accomplishment after a long day is big—at least for me.
- Flip through a magazine: Shape, Rachel Ray, or HGTV. I usually don’t have the mental power to read an entire article, but I look at the photos and skim the articles that interest me. This always gives my mind a reset.
If you need to put your brain into park and regenerate like I need to do on a regular basis, I highly recommend any of these five activities. Oh, and adding a glass of wine to any of them will double the effect.
Pick up Mirror X by Karri Thompson for just 99¢!
I was born more than a thousand years ago.
Put into a cryogenic tube at age seventeen, forgotten during a holocaust that decimated the world, I’ve finally been awakened to a more serene and peaceful future.
But things at the hospital are new and strange. And it’s starting to scare me.
Everyone is young. Everyone is banded and tracked. And everyone is keeping secrets.
The cute geneticist Michael Bennett might be the only good thing in this crazy new world where “life is precious” but no one seems free to live it. The problem is, I don’t think he’s being totally honest with me, either.
When I’m told only I can save the human race from extinction, it’s clear my freeze didn’t avoid a dreadful fate. It only delayed the horror…
Growing up in San Diego, California, Karri Thompson spent much of her years at the beach, reading novels,tanning,and listening to hard rock. At SDSU, she majored in English with the goal of becoming an author. Once she became a wife, mother, and high-school English teacher, her dream came true, and all of the plots and characters in her head finally found a home. Victorian literature rocks her socks, and when she ‘s not writing, she’s reading Dickens. Karri Thompson also writes sexy, edge of your seat paranormals, under Kalli Lanford.
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