There are things you mean to do. Then there are the things you actually do.

Somewhere in the middle is a passport that expired two years ago sitting in a drawer.

I'd been meaning to renew it for ... well, longer than I care to admit. 

It kept showing up on my mental to-do lists, right between "organize the closet in the room with the dog crates" and "figure out how to keep that squirrel out of the shed." 

It was the sort of thing important enough to acknowledge but not urgent enough to actually handle — until Sunday, that is. 

This past weekend, I found myself pulling into the Sullivan County Government Center parking lot for something called "Passport-Palooza." The name alone deserves recognition. Whoever decided that adding "palooza" to passport applications would kick a few butts into gear deserves a raise. It worked. Here I was, voluntarily spending part of my Sunday morning walking into our county’s main government building. There were already a few people who’d braved the flying flurries and whipping wind to line up in the County Clerk’s office ahead of us. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who'd been quietly ignoring an expired passport while it slowly moved from "I should really take care of that" to "I definitely need to take care of that" to “Fine, I'll do it if someone makes it easy enough."

The Sullivan County Clerk's Office made it easy enough.

Inside, the staff was pleasant in that way that makes you wonder what they're putting in the coffee, because it's Sunday morning and they're processing passport applications with genuine cheerfulness. No one was acting like they'd rather be literally anywhere else, which is remarkable considering they probably would rather be literally anywhere else.

The whole thing was efficient in a way that government processes rarely are. 

Have your documents ready? Great. 

Not sure what you need? That’s OK. We’ll help you figure it out. 

Got your application ready to go? Let’s go through things to make sure everything’s in order. 

The woman processing our applications walked us through each step like she actually cared whether we understood what was happening — which forms needed to go where, how long it would take, where to check the status of our application. 

And then — and this is the part that really got me — they mailed it for me.

As in, I didn't have to take my neatly compiled passport application and then find time to get to the post office during the four hours a day it happens to be open. They just did it for me, right there, taking yet another thing off that miles-long to-do list. 

I walked out of there 20 minutes after I'd walked in, passport application complete, feeling that particular brand of satisfaction that comes from finally checking something off a list that's been haunting you for months.

It's a strange thing, finding yourself grateful for a well-run Sunday morning government event. But the things that make your life easier are worth showing up for — even on a Sunday, even at a government building on said Sunday, even (definitely?) when the event name includes the word "palooza."

My passport will arrive in a few weeks, good for another 10 years which means I have a solid decade before this task cycles back to the bottom of my to-do list, slowly aging from "I should really" to "I definitely need to" to “Fine, is there a palooza I can attend?"

By then, maybe they'll be calling it Passport-Palooza 2.0.