No writing, though, and still no exercise because I am still not feeling well. And sorry for the epic post. It was a full day.
I am also hard at work to shift my morning routine back because no wood stove means that breakfast happens an hour earlier which means there is less time for morning pages, writing, yoga and meditation. Unless I get up earlier. Well, change is a process.
I did text the boy while we were eating breakfast. He was afraid of oversleeping so we had agreed I would call him on the phone at a certain time but because he had gone to bed rather early the night before I thought he might already be up. Which he was.
He was already up and had gone out to get something to eat. Supplying him with tea bags turned out to be a very good idea because he had an electric kettle. It wasn’t proper tea, just chamomile for his cold but still, something warm in the morning.
He studied some more before checking out and then walked over to campus. I didn’t ask him for permission to post the picture he took out of his window the night before but I’m sure he’ll be okay with it:
The place is really deserted after uni closes, there’s the campus (where no one lives), a few diners and that’s it.
He wrote his exam and was doing okay-ish. He doesn’t really know yet what the requirements for a passing grade are, the system there is really weird.
While the boy was writing his exam I was at home unable to focus in waiting mode. But I did manage to start the whole Friday routine earlier than usual. I did the dishes, did my weekly cleaning, folded the remnants of three loads of laundry and hung up a third. I changed the towels and even pulled most of the gunk out of the bathtub drain. Yuck. And cleaned half the bathtub which is a major win.
Meanwhile my husband said he wanted to go for a walk/run and left the kitchen. Twenty minutes later he was back because he needed to start the beans. Then I thought he left but half an hour later he came back after sweeping the driveway and clearing off moss. Both of us were feeling the warm and sunny weather and got into spring cleaning mode.
Then I thought he had left for good but no, he had went out to get soda and alcohol-free beer and such, And then a bit later he finally went out for his run.
All of this was fine but every single time I crossed over to the annex we ran into each other and got startled. He doesn’t deal well with being shocked, especially not every other minute. He also claims that I’m not walking over at a normal tempo but that I’m going extra fast. And at the precisely wrong moment every time. Not quite on purpose but who knows.
Never mind that I got startled too. You think you’re alone in the house and then you almost run over your spouse, that is a bit of a surprise. But well, I get startled, I realize it’s nothing serious, I calm back down. For my husband calling back down apparently takes the rest of the day.
So, whatever I do and whenever I do it, every time I clean the house it ends in conflict. This isn’t working. We’ve talking a fighting about this for decades now. The only time me cleaning plan worked was back in the day when he had a Friday morning student who was also a friend. They’d meet at 11, there would be a 1-hour lesson and then they’d walk over the Greek restaurant and have lunch and my husband would come back around the time the boy and I ate pizza. At first I would make frozen pizza but after a while I made it from scratch because it tastes better.
So I would make the pizza dough the night before after buying all the ingredients on Tuesday, start the dishes and cleaning right when they started the lesson, go all the way through with cleaning until it was time to start making the pizza and finish cleaning while the pizza was in the oven. We’d sit down to eat around 1 and the house would be clean and a load of laundry started. Sometimes I was a little late and had to finish cleaning in the evening.
Well, that doesn’t work anymore.
So starting next week I’ll go back to another strategy I tried before, cleaning a little bit every day. I have a list and I can divide the individual steps out. Clean mirrors on Mondays, dust on Tuesdays, empty wastepaper baskets and deal with recycling on Wednesdays, change towels on Thursdays, vacuum the annex on Fridays, vacuum the old part of the house on Saturdays and do washbasins and toilets on Sundays.
Never mind that I have never ever managed to spread it out like that. Because it’s only ten minutes here and there I find myself thinking that I can easily push it a day or two, Vacuuming on Fridays and Saturday would work best because that is the most disruptive and those are two days where my husband usually goes for a run. We’ll see how that goes.
By lunchtime we were both rather angry at each other which is always sad and unnecessary. We both apologized but we need to find a different solution. I hope the new cleaning plan will work better.
The boy ate lunch on campus while we were having delicious beans and rice:
I actually added parmesan later.
After lunch I was still livid. I tried playing Genshin but couldn’t really focus and then my husband showed right in the middle of a pretty annoying fight in the game and I just quite the game and called it quits. Husband apologized, I apologized and he couldn’t understand why I was so super angry.
One reason for my anger was also that I wasn’t feeling well, I was dizzy all morning and very weak. I needed to sit down all the time and that is getting rather old. I wasn’t sure if I should stop and at which point but once I started things went well and I was delighted to get everything done in one fell swoop.
Then it was time to teach. Very nice students and not all that many.
Meanwhile the boy had returned home. He had not walked along the river but instead taken two busses. It went well even though everything was very, very full. When he was back home he was so exhausted that he didn’t even told e he was back. I went into the kitchen between students and saw his water bottle and the noticed his shoes in the hallway.
After I finished teaching I hung up the laundry we had started in the morning and then did the dishes, descaled the electric kettle and changed and cleaned the BRITA filter. While the boy was telling me everything about his exam with examples. And he poured over the problems they were given and tried figuring out how much he got right and how many points he’d get for that.
My mother-in-law then sent him downstairs with her phone which wasn’t working.This was the second time without a phone this week. This is getting old. I thought it was our six year old router but that doesn’t see to be the case.
I still spent an hour researching routers and ended up ordering yet another one. This time I am not cancelling the order, I will go through with it and install the annoying thing to see if it works.
I just wanted an updated version of the old model that we are using but that doesn’t exist. I have no idea what to look out for and was just taking a stab in the dark, wish me luck.
Then I finally ate dinner, played some more, started writing this post which took a while because this is 1,300 words long at this point. I am very sorry.
I wrote my list for today, took an ibuprofen and nasal spray, washed my face, brushed my teeth, changed into pajamas and went to bed. If I were really good I would mop the kitchen and bathroom floors today, wash the shower curtain and pull out then radiator attachment for the vacuum and tackle the bathroom radiator. This one and the one in the living room are rather old and they have these rips that collect dust like crazy. Dust on radiators can be a fire hazard even though that doesn’t happen often.
So. Writing, maybe meditation and some more cleaning and laundry today, Writer Zoom and maybe ‚Columbo‘. I’d ay that will be enough. Phew.
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