Yes, there can be a Monday slump as well

Woke up from the alarm at 6.45 and did my whole morning routine. Which was a great start into the week I’d say.

Then I had breakfast and talked with my husband while he was starting the fire. I finished the first mitten for my mother and continued reading:

Husband left for a doctor’s appointment and I took so long knitting, reading and playing games that I hadn’t started the breakfast dishes before he came back. I did fold a bit of laundry but found that not all was dry due to inefficient hanging and so couldn’t finish that task. I maybe should pin a note to the drying racks reminding everyone that crumpled fabric takes a lot longer to dry.

I had planned to do bodyweight training and open the manuscript but then got a voicemail from an official-sounding woman asking if we had returned the cards she had put in our mailbox on November 29th regarding reading the electricity meters. You know, those cards.

I dimly remembered reading at least one meter, maybe two and reporting in but I distinctly remembered one of them meant moving the big table in the laundry room which means it must have been the water meter. And maybe the gas meter. But I’m not sure because I’ve done it so many times I don’t remember. I could look that one up, though.

So I looked for a card. And asked my husband. And remembered the letter we got from the electricity company that I still hadn’t read properly that turned out to tell us the new (higher) prices. Then I went upstairs and asked my mother-in-law who pulled out a letter from the phone company that she had been wanting to talk to me about. I assured her that while the phone company would prefer her to receive her monthly bill by email she was not required to get an email address to make their life easier. We determined that if there ever had been any cards we certainly didn’t have them.

I called the woman back after taking pictures of the two meters in the basement. We have two and I never remember which is for which part of the house. The whole thing is made even more complicated because decades past the family made the decision to put the electricity for out part of the house – which used to be the grandparents’ apartment – on my father-in-law’s account and my mother-in-law’s electricity use gets recorded on what used to be the grandfather’s account because he used to work at the then electricity company and got a cheaper rate. Oh, and the top floor is connected to the meter for the first floor apartment. Naturally. In practice there are two accounts, one on my husband and one on my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law pays it all and gets a flat rate for electricity, insurance, garbage disposal, water and other stuff from us. While we pay for gas. And yes, it’s a slightly wonky system.

Anyways, there I was, talking to this woman on the phone who was sure she had given us cards and while I was trying to sort everything out my mother-in-law burst into the room, excitedly waving a newspaper clipping around that said the peopled from the electricity company would come to read the meters some time between October and January. I think that was meant to prove that the woman was in the wrong and we had done everything right but I think that maybe she rang the doorbell, found no one home and thought she had dropped the cards in the mailbox but we’ll never know.

Again, I pushed my mother-in-law out the door as gently as possible while the woman on the phone realized that she had put the numbers from the wrong meter in. Because we had a misunderstanding. She hadn’t really concluded the action but she also had no idea how to change the numbers, so that was fun. In the end she took a note (at least I hope she did) of the readings for both meters and told me that she would have to sort it all out later when in the office.

So we might get a very weird electricity bill. Or not, we’ll see.

Then there was lunch:

I took a bit of a break after that, failed to do the dishes, tried printing two cookie recipes and writing a new, simplified version of „Happy Birthday“ for my first student of the day but the printer was acting up a bit and so I had to finish writing the song down while he was already there.

My next to last student canceled and my last student was still out with covid so you’d think I would have had a lot of time in the evenings. Um, no.

I did some bodyweight training, ate dinner and then fell into a time vortex until the boy showed up at 10.30 just as I had started writing this post. We talked at length, I finally started writing and decided to leave the dishes, the shower and the C-drama for today. A decision that will bite me today for sure.

And today will be extra full, of course, with errands and endless teaching. Well, at least I’m looking forward to book two in the ‚Tokyo MPD Mysteries“ series.