No cliches here. Life is a picnic. When you consider that picnics aren’t always fun, that is.

I’ve been on good picnics, bad picnics, memorable picnics, disastrous picnics. I’ve been on picnics I didn’t even know were picnics.

Sometimes work is a picnic, but not often. When you’ve been cranking on a deliverable, up against a hard deadline (why aren’t all deadlines hard?), blocking out everything from the chatter in the pathways surrounding your 9×9 cube to the voices in your head; and you finally finish, an hour early, and press send, the next hour is a picnic.

Because you’ve earned it, even if you negotiated that hard deadline after missing the previous five.

So you take in a little Google News, then move to Reader, where your 200+ feeds have served up 967 unread posts since you cleared it out last night. What’s going on the tech world, you wonder . . . nothing much, another update to the beta release of Chrome, another must-download iPhone app that you rush to check out on the precious you’ve looked at every 15 minutes since walking in this morning. In economics, Clusterstock says the world is going to end by the closing bell, but you don’t care, because you finally beat your closing bell by that glorious, well-deserved hour.

There’s an unread in photos, it has to be Big Picture you think, so you g-u over and lo, a series of photos from a riot in Uzbekistan yet again reminds you how fortunate you are to be sitting in this cube. You click through the warning that this particular photo might be unpleasant, but you tell yourself you can take, and it is, and you can, at least now. Later tonight, you’ll remember it though, and realize there’s a difference between taking it and not being able to get it out of your mind.

Your podcast feeds are piling up too, you only read the titles here, never listening; that’s reserved for precious and his tangled earphones when you’re washing the dishes tonight or falling asleep after that last Coke Zero. Seems to be a few worth looking forward to: IssuesEtc, a new Mac Power Users, something interesting at On Point, last Saturday’s Unbelievable? that you’ve neglected thus far. These podcasts are a refuge, a chance to listen to intelligent talk, even if you can’t talk back (well, you could call in or send an email).

And, then, Instapundit. While you were cranking through that deliverable, Reynolds found the time to post 15 tantalizing tidbits about nanotechnology, firearms, Obama, station wagons, and all sorts of other miscellany that (how did he know?) you’d find so interesting that you’d blow the next 40 minutes on. How does he do it? You don’t ask why he does it because you know, he’s an information sponge for whom the internet was born. Unlike you, who would never have graduated from college had the internet been around, he doubtlessly would have, because who else can teach law and post so much at the same time?

(Althouse can too, you think, but you haven’t checked her feed yet. That’s for the next hour.)