I mean, the day started very well, I had gotten enough sleep and written morning pages and meditated, I had more energy and was pretty pumped up about the upcoming year and finally getting stuff done. I was a little late so I had skipped yoga (again) but that meant I was finished with breakfast early, so all was good and I set out to weave in all the ends. (She did not weave in all the ends.) The mail person rang the doorbell because they had a package that did not fit into the mailbox and that was a lovely surprise:
The Anti-Planner is gorgeous and pretty hefty and looks very fun, I’m loving it already.
Determined to get some stuff done I set out to do my daily round around the internet, ahem, and then opened the manuscript and did some revising. Then onto the dishes while listening to a video, then my husband came back from running. I schlepped all the recycling outside and crammed it into the trash cans, printed something out for my mother-in-law, hung the laundry up that my husband had washed, ate lunch, took a break and was pretty sure I’d get a substantial portion of my to-do list done.
Oh, I almost forgot to show you lunch:
Around 3.30 the boy showed up and then my husband because we had agreed that we would take care of the clogged bathroom sink. But first we tried finding our plumber’s snake again but we couldn’t. Both of us looked everywhere but no luck. So I pulled out my bike and went to the hardware store.
Came back with two of those snakes in different sizes and some nasty chemical thing for the unclogging. My husband tried getting the snake into the pipe but nope. It went about 20 centimeters in and that was it. So we put everything back together and started chemical warfare. Because I’m cautious and always worried about the old pipes in this house we started with baking soda and vinegar. And hot water. And again. And again. And again.
Meanwhile frustration was rising and we started yelling at each other and slamming doors which is always great.
While I had been away my husband had also done the lunch dishes (very laudable) and unscrewed the old toilet seat so we could finally mount the new one that I had bought in 2019, ahem, and he cleaned the whole disgusting toilet. All of this was rather nice but it meant that now the whole bathroom was in shambles instead of just the sink.
By then frustration was high and we were starting to get hungry. I figured out how to mount the toilet seat, found that the screw anchors didn’t fit through the holes in the toilet, we tried squeezing them in anyway, constantly getting into each other’s way because each of us was convinced he had found a solution. We did not find a solution, they just didn’t fit. Fortunately there was another way of anchoring the seat. So I started putting everything together just to find that – the screws were too short for our toilet. Fortunately we are the proud owners of an extensive screw collection in the basement and since my husband spent some weeks sorting them all he often actually finds what he needs. After two tries we found screws that are long enough. And it only took me four tries to mount everything properly, including one where I managed to sink one of the metal caps into the toilet and then had to fish it out again through the hydrochloric acid my husband had put in to remove urine scale.
In the meantime I kept trying to declog the sink and it did start to clear up a little faster but not much faster.
Then we finally got to eat dinner but had almost run out of bread. I think what happened was that there had been enough bread for everything the night before, then the boy ate lots during the night, my husband took some for his breakfast and after that he was very surprised that there wasn’t enough bread left for all of us for dinner. He and I shared the last bit of it and had a boiled egg each and the plan was that the boy ate leftover spaetzle and red cabbage. Only – the spaetzle had gone bad already. So he got to eat leftovers from lunch.
After all of that I still had to decalcify the electric kettle and change the BRITA filter all while pouring more boiling water down the clogged drain. I finally took a shower, the boy took a shower as well, I started writing this post, finally got the boy to try on his new pajamas, found out that the pajamas were too small (no surprise here, I had told him to order a bigger size from the start), took about ten minutes to figure out how to do the return and why the order wasn’t in my account with the shop where I had ordered (the reason was that I had gone directly to PayPal without logging in, duh), started the return process and ordered two pairs of larger pajamas (and paid for them) and by then it was already my bedtime and I still hadn’t done the dishes. Also couldn’t do the dishes at that point because the boy was taking a shower. More fun for today, then.
I watched some C-drama and knitted a bit anyway.
Today there will be all the dishes, some more laundry, the weekly phone call to my mother, Chinese, some nice food for New Year’s, some champagne and the endless waiting for midnight, I guess.
