Not in a bad way overall but – no writing again. I gave up after finding myself on Instagram for half an hour before bed because I couldn’t decide whether I should start with the beginnings of this post, the manuscript or Genshin.
I overslept in the morning (lights out after midnight) and was woken by a message on my smartwatch that I had a phone call on my cell. Which was in the kitchen. So I got up, called that person back and found out that the plumber would be coming over between 10 and 11. Woot!
I managed some distracted morning pages, yoga and meditation, my husband showed up and was in a much better mood than the day before despite having slept badly and we ate breakfast.
I switched things around a bit at that point, brushed my teeth and did the dishes before I had even finished drinking my tea but I was done by ten and the plumber rang the doorbell at 10.15.
Very nice guy who diagnosed the dripping faucet in the bathroom (dripping down underneath the washbasin along the wall) as being beyond repair so we needed a new one and the dripping faucet in the kitchen as just needing a new o-ring. I should learn how to change that myself at one point. I should also remember that changing that ring does not require turning off the water. Actually, he didn’t turn the water off at all. Huh.
While that guy was there my husband also noticed a dripping pipe in the basement near the furnace. The plumber took some pictures to document it, showed me an impressive hole on the underside of the pipe (I also need to remember that I can use my phone to look into places I can’t easily reach otherwise) and told me he’d tell his boss and that they would get back to us. If they didn’t we should call them again because they are buried under work right now.
So that went very well.
Meanwhile my sister had asked me to phone her so we could talk about our mother’s impending release from the hospital. She would rather not have to move up to her for a couple of weeks, like all of us, but unfortunately my job and all the doctor’s appointments and my upcoming cataract surgery make it extremely hard for me to do so, and her job – unfortunately for her – doesn’t require her to be in a specific place at a specific time.
We talked for an hour or so, then her phone battery gave out, we picked up our conversation again over mobile and then my husband was super stressed because a) he had been dealing with glass recycling and had gone for a run (in the heat, after a short night of bad sleep), b) he had planned to work on his vegetable beds but had run out of time and c) he was not only trying to make a mixed salad, two kinds of sauce and mozzarella with tomatoes, had thawed another loaf of bread and had plans to pick arugula and parsley from the garden but he was also staring down a brutal teaching day on top of that.
And I was on the phone, talking and laughing. I tend to use dry humor a lot in crisis. Crying and panicking never helps.
Husband felt that I should have cut the phone call short so I could help with making lunch.
I did chop stuff for the salad, grated parmesan, listened to my husband venting and tried tidying the kitchen and setting the table while he was rushing through the kitchen like a tsunami.
He decided to skip the mozzarella, the arugula and the parsley and was very frustrated to be using frozen parsley instead of the fresh one that was just out the door.
We ate lunch. I was sure I had taken a picture but apparently I didn’t so imagine some spaghetti bolognese with a mixed salad.
After lunch I decided to go to the health food store real quick before it was time to teach. I did give in to the temptation of buying four different kinds of chocolate bar and I ate three of them. I gave the last one to the boy, at least.
Then I taught two students, thought I’d start the dishes in my 30-minute break but somehow didn’t really get anything done. My next student just didn’t show without saying anything which is rather unusual, and the one after that told me she couldn’t make it – 5 minutes before her lesson.
At that point I had already devolved into scrolling through social media. And reading which is quite a bit better. But I did go upstairs to my mother-in-law to give her the vacuum cleaner bags I had ordered for her (there was a point where she was convinced her bag was reusable which it definitely wasn’t and we ended up talking for half an hour. She tried to pay me for the bags three times or more (after having given me the money right away), and in the evening the boy came downstairs saying she was asking if she had already paid me.
I gave in at one point and ate dinner, then the boy and I did bodyweight training, Husband and the boy finally ate the mozzarella and tomatoes while I picked up my knitting for the first time that day, and then I spent too much time scrolling because I had ran out of decision energy.
I started this post, spun for a few minutes and went to bed.
Oh, and beside the vacuum cleaner bags there was also a nice big envelope holding the boy’s bachelor’s certificate. I haven’t even looked at it so far but will do so today.
Fingers crossed that today will be a little less packed. And that I’ll find more writing time, my writer friend already had to cancel our Zoom call.
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