Friday
4:00p: I'm frantically trying to finish work and hop on the stationary bike. I'm itching for a good workout, and if I don't start soon, things are going to get tricky. S was away for work all week, and I can see on the Find My app that she's landed and is in a car on the way home. If I'm already in the middle of my workout when she gets here then everything will be fine. If I haven't started it yet, then I'm going to have to talk (or more likely listen) to her for a sufficient amount of time, so as to not seem like an uncaring spouse, and that's going to push back my workout, and then the kids are going to come home, and then we're gonna have to do dinner, and so on and so forth.
4:15p: Lil' S2 calls, and he wants some friends to come over after school. It's fine with me, but I have to clear it with S first, so I call her, and she says it's okay, but she doesn't want them to walk home because of the icy conditions. I call Lil' S2 back and tell him that it's fine with us, but he has to clear it with his friend's mother because it's her turn to drive. (We have a carpool for when they can't walk.)
4:20p: I remember that I forgot to cook something for dinner, and if I don't get something started, the kids are going to bother me about getting carryout, and it's always incredibly annoying to get them carryout on Friday because traffic is so bad and last time we did delivery it was like $60 for the two of them, so I don't want to do that, nor do I want to fight about it, so I gotta have an established alternative. I throw some chicken in the pressure cooker and rice in the rice cooker and go to put on my workout clothes.
4:25p: S comes home. I didn't make it. What's worse is that I have a bunch of missed calls on my phone from Lil' S2 and a bunch of texts from his friends' mom. She didn't have room in the car for everybody who was coming over because her son neglected to tell her that he had not only Lil' S2 with him but two other kids as well. So, unable to get a hold of me, Lil' S2 and his friends started walking home, and S is not happy when she hears this, and she leaves to pick them up, even though she literally just walked through the door after traveling for the last 15 hours. I offer to pick them up instead, but I do so halfheartedly (for one thing, I'm in a t-shirt and shorts; for another, I don't really mind them walking), and I'm pretty sure S picks up on that.
4:27p: I shut myself off in the guest room where our stationary bike is, put in my earbuds, crank up the volume (my iPhone now warns me that it might be too loud), and start pedaling. I don't think S will be annoyed with me for going AWOL for an hour or so. I was alone with the kids for a week--and it was not an easy week!--so I think I have some relationship capital built up in my favor.
5:30p: S isn't annoyed at all, and she tells me all about her trip. I pretend to be very interested, and she pretends to not know that I'm actually only mildly interested. That's a happy marriage in action right there.
6:30p: I eat chicken and rice casserole for dinner.
7:30p: I watch two episodes of Modern Family with S and the boys. Lil' S1 takes so long to get ready to watch the show for some reason. We're all waiting for him, and I yell that if he takes any longer, we're going to be watching Ancient Family instead. It's a solid 6 of a joke.
8:30p: Lil' S2 has gotten into Rubik's cubing again, so he has me time him on his solves. His fastest is 45 seconds, which is legit impressive. The thing is, he uses the same algorithm I do, but I struggle to get below two minutes.
10:30p: I listen to a podcast and solve a crossword contest puzzle with a meta theme. I crack the meta very quickly and submit my answer. If I'm correct (and I'm confident I am; it's one of those things where you know it when you get it), and my name is selected at random, then I will win some sweet crossword puzzle merch. I've gotten the right answer in this contest probably 20 times over the past few years and never won it. One of these days...
11:45p: I get in bed to sleep, but S is in the middle of the mattress, so I have to try to push her over without her waking up. I'm somewhat successful. I get her to move a few inches and decide not to push it (or her) any further, even though I'm still kinda cramped.
Saturday
8:45a: I wake up and Lil' S1 is making pancakes. Although I typically don't eat breakfast, I make an exception because it's a family thing, and pancakes are delicious. It's a good decision on my part. The mix of butter and maple syrup on a warm fluffy pancake, washed down with some coffee, is an almost unbeatable breakfast combination.
1:00p: Lil' S1 has some friends come to play D&D and socialize in the way nerdy 8th graders socialize. Lil' S2, S, and I watch Back to the Future Part III to finish up the trilogy. It still holds up for the most part. The very end is kinda corny. I wish they would have handled it differently, but whatever. I ask Lil' S2 to rank the three films, and he says II, I, III. That's probably what I would have said as a child also. The future scenes in II are cool when you're a kid. As an adult, however, I think II is the worst of them. It goes I, a massive gap, III, a little gap, II.
3:30p: Needing to do something physical and to charge our EV, I decide to clear a path in our driveway to the charger. I didn't do it before, which was a mistake, as now there is about six feet of solid, inches-thick ice that needs to be excavated before our car can get close enough to be reached by the charging cable. I have to use two shovels to do the job-- a long gardening spade with a triangular head to cut through the ice and a big flat snow shovel to scoop it up. It's very satisfying work--one of those jobs where initially you think there is no way you are ever going to get through it, but you just start chipping away (literally, in this case) and get lost in your thoughts (S needed my phone, so I wasn't listening to a podcast, as I usually would), and then you look up, and think to yourself Goddamn, I'm like halfway done already! The cold is absolutely brutal, with the whipping winds it feels like it's subzero, but I keep warm by bundling up. I do two things that are huge in this regard: 1) Where a scarf and wrap it tightly from my neck to my eyes, so that almost my entire face is covered; 2) Put one of those hard-warmers with the little pellets that you shake up in my pocket and grab it from time-to-time. Even with two pairs of gloves on, it's my hands that tend to get unbearably cold, so the hand-warmer was crucial.
4:00p: S needs my phone because she's switching us to a much cheaper plan. She gets her and Lil' S1's phones switched successfully and is very proud of herself for doing so, which I know because she mentions about five times how proud of herself she is. Hey, I get it. Navigating all that customer service stuff totally sucks. The only problem is that we can't switch Lil' S2's watch to the new plan because they don't offer standalone service for watches. You have to tie it to a phone, which we don't want to do. This also means we can't switch my phone yet, as all the passwords and stuff for our old account are on my phone. The solution is probably to break down and get Lil' S2 a phone. I guess we just embrace the dark side.
7:00p: Both the boys go to friends' houses for sleepovers, giving S and I a night to ourselves. We turn on a fire and enjoy some kid-free time, by which I mean we sit next to each other on the sofa while she watches something on her iPad, and I listen to a podcast and play NYT games.
10:00p: Remembering that the Super Bowl is tomorrow and that I'm going to be done with football for a while once it ends (especially if the Seahawks lose), I decide to watch a Super Bowl from my childhood. I settle on Super Bowl XXII, Washington 42, Denver 10. It's not a very close game, but it's a fun one, and you only really need to watch the second quarter. Washington fell behind early 10-0 after the first quarter, and then rattled off five straight touchdowns to take a 35-10 lead into halftime. It's pretty remarkable to watch. It's one of the greatest "flip the script" games of all time.
Sunday
8:30a: I wake up and spend most the morning doing chores--laundry, trash, and the like. I want to do a workout this afternoon, and this evening I'll be watching the Super Bowl, of course, so I gotta get all the boring stuff out of the way first. Plus, S took the boys "volunteering" (dropping off meals to elderly people), so I don't want to look like a slacker.
1:00p: Everybody returns home, and S is grumbling because the kids were bickering a bit while doing their volunteering. It sounds like pretty standard sibling stuff to me. They both want to make cookies for the Super Bowl tonight, but Lil' S2 refuses to work with Lil' S1, so they're each making their own batch. It's one of those things where Lil' S1 is actually a very good baker, and Lil' S2 doesn't like his older brother having that over him (even though it's only over him in his own mind), so he wants to prove that he can bake cookies on his own, even though he can't yet. It leads to a pretty funny exchange, with Lil' S2 looking at his iPad and Lil' S1 looking over his shoulder.
Lil' S1: Are you just googling "cookie dough"? I have a sugar cookie recipe you can use in my cookbook.
Lil' S2: I don't want sugar cookies. I want cookie dough.
Lil' S1: What do you mean you want cookie dough? All cookies are made from cookie dough, even sugar cookies.
Lil' S2: Yeah, but I don't want sugar cookies. I want chocolate chip cookies.
Lil' S1: Okay, then google "chocolate chip cookie recipes." You can't just google "cookie dough." [Turning to S and I and chuckling.] He was just googling "cooking dough."
Lil' S2: Just go away! I don't need your help! I can do it myself!
2:30p: Another funny quote from Lil' S1 involving food: "No thanks, I'll make it myself. I watch a lot of grilled cheese sandwich videos."
4:00p: We are going to a friend's house for the Super Bowl tonight, and it's not a Seahawk-centric thing. It's just a normal, nonpartisan Super Bowl party. A lot of hardcore fans don't like going to parties with non-fans, because there are so many distractions around, but I actually prefer it specifically because of the distractions. It reminds me that sports fandom is supposed to be fun and social and that it actually doesn't matter to my life who wins. I do, however, download the Peacock app on my phone and log in with my sister-in-law's credentials. This way I'll always have access to the game. We usually leave this party at halftime, because the Super Bowl is on too late on the East Coast (why not a 4:25p start time like regular season games?), but the hosts like to do this raffle thing with all the kids during halftime, and so by the time we actually get home, the game is well into the third quarter. When it's two teams I don't care about, this is fine, but with the Seahawks, I might want to have S drive and watch in the car.
10:30p: Seahawks win the Super Bowl 29-13. Hell yeah!
Until next time...
