Last week was the first week that I managed to run all three 5ks. I’m supposed to run one every Monday, Wednesday, Friday but, you know how it is. Life happens. Somebody’s got a doctor’s appointment, somebody has a prior engagement, SOMETHING.
Well, last week was the first week in which nothing happened. So I ran all three.
Lemme tell ya, the hot showers after running a 5k are something else. The tight shoulders, the steam from the labored breathing, and just feeling all of the muscle malaise go down the drain with the water.
Then, this week, life happened. Monday night, my bud told me to go out on the porch and take a deep breath. I did and I caught nothing but smoke. It was awful. We decided to cancel.
Wednesday, I woke up and looked outside of the window and saw this:
And OMIGOSH OMIGOSH SNOW!!!!! Wait, wait, wait a second… look at the ground. Dry as a bone. Bummer. I mean, not that I get snow days anymore as a grownup. And it’s not like I can use the excuse “I can’t work today because I can’t go into work” ever again. I still got excited.
As it turns out, the ground was NOT dry as a bone, it was wet and slick enough to make jogging an iffy proposition. So, on Wednesday night, I got to experience the other kind of perfect hot shower:
The hot shower when you are kinda cold. Not, like, freezing or anything… But when you’ve been in a place where you could easily run out to the mailbox in a tank top, or, if you’re feeling frisky, take out the trash without wearing a shirt at all, and then you go from that to “don’t even think about taking the trash to the curb without at least a long sleeve shirt on”, and then you get into a steamy hot shower?
Oh, my gosh. That’s just heaven.
And, tomorrow, we should be back to having temps in the 60s, 70’s over the weekend, and 80’s again next week. So running’s back on. I’ll probably regret swapping the sheets out earlier today and putting one of the woven blankets on the bed in addition to the sheets and top cover by, oh, Saturday night. So I’m sure that this weekend will be spent digging that blanket back out and putting it back in the closet.
But, for a few days, it was nice to get a taste of winter.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Skritch”, photo taken by Maribou.)
One thing that was kind of a bummer, going downstairs to check my morning emails and have my morning scrum over the skype, I wore one of the outfits that I wore back at the beginning of Safe At Home.
Pajama Pants. Hoodie. Slippers.
And it was surprisingly depressing.Report
there are lots of things in this I have found surprisingly depressing, that I wouldn’t have even noticed in the before-times.Report
Yep. Spent Monday hauling some of the 32-year accumulation of stuff that we are not moving out to the dumpster in the 90-degree heat. Wednesday, hauling similar stuff out to the dumpster with the temperature hovering just above freezing. Today, call the moving company and fix the exact date they’ll be hauling the remaining stuff to the new place. Next week, multiple loads of stuff to Goodwill, starting with the electronics and cabling. And packing is about to become a way of life.Report
Packing. The last time we moved was in the early oughts.
We had maybe half as many books as we have now.
Next time we’re just going to set the house on fire and start over.Report
I am beginning to feel “set the house on fire and start over” in re the cleaning and decluttering I need to do 🙁Report
Fortunately, a few years back I began converting books from paper to e-formats. To date, something over 600 titles. It’s ongoing, and every few months I dump a copy of everything to DVD-ROM and put it in the safe deposit box. We can discuss the legality of the details some other time.
An old friend moved back to Denver from Washington, DC last year after he retired. Over beer, he said that the hardest choice he made was to throw away all the boxes with the pieces that went into his PhD dissertation.Report
You say “six hundred”, I hear “six percent”.Report
Start now.Report
I’ve simply been buying more books! Moving companies don’t care about weight for short hauls, so it makes no difference to them. (Long haul moves are a bit different)Report
Remember, you’ll regret every bit of pre-move work you don’t do. That small box of stuff you’re thinking of sorting through? If you don’t do it early, you’ll have to label it, find a place for it, lift it, lift it again, and eventually sort through it anyway. You want to space out your moving prep work, but space it out to get it 100% done before the move.Report
I know. I’m trying to go through everything and be ruthless. Mrs. Cain doesn’t want to be so ruthless, which is why she insisted that the new place have a basement. It’s a townhouse, and the upstairs feels like a townhouse, but somehow it has an absolutely ginormous basement. The tankless water heater and super-efficient HVAC unit sit next to one wall and take up hardly any space.Report
“Sweetie. Just hear me out: Billiard Table.”Report
I don’t even think it’s about being ruthless; it’s about being thorough. If you want to keep the stuff in the box, stick a label on it. You just have to make every foreseeable decision and do every foreseeable task before “go time”. You may have packed the clothes, but what about the closet full of hangers? That’s 10 minutes’ extra work on the busiest three days of your life. And don’t plan on moving that heavy thing then vacuuming behind it on moving day; move it a little bit three weeks earlier and vacuum then.
Oh, and there’s no shame in getting three meals delivered in one day if it lets you pack up the kitchen early.Report
I don’t even know what I’m going to do. I have grading I need to do, I can do some of that this afternoon while waiting for the SECOND COMING of the garage-door guy. (I paid nearly $500 earlier this week to have a new opener unit installed and not only does it not work right, the guy didn’t put a lightbulb in it so it doesn’t light up when you open the garage door. Do not recommend this place even if they are the only local one).
I feel like I need something “fun,” but what? We’ve had heavy rain so trying to go hiking seems inadvisible. And anywhere where I am going to be indoors in a crowd for a prolonged time is out, at least for a couple more years. No “fun” shopping to do in town….Maybe I just write off this weekend and work ahead and also clean house, and just get used to the fact that “fun” is something not on the table right now.Report
I’ve been looking at my various vacation days and sick days accrue and accrue and accrue.
And there’s a part of my brain that does a small jump for joy and says “OH YEAH!”
And the other part of my brain that says “what in the heck are you going to do with a day off?”
All that to say: I hear ya.
(The wacky thing is that the current crisis really drives home the whole “can’t go out and play because it’s raining” thing that kids shows in the 50s and 60’s had going on.)Report
Yeah, we had to replace our AC (to the tune of about five grand), which took a significant chunk of our savings. I was disappointed, but I was also saying, “we can’t travel anywhere right now anyhoo, so no big deal.” (and the ac lasted 17 years, which is pretty good for those)Report
Yeah. One thing that Maribou mentioned the other day when we paid the mortgage was that, used to, it was vaguely irritating. Now? Hey, we’re actually paying for the building where we spend almost all of our time. It’s not merely the box where our bed and tv is.Report
Good point. I’d wager that people will approach house hunting differently now and post-COVID (whatever that looks like).Report
Door guy has been. I hope he chews on the original installer, there was something the installer failed to do and that he COULD HAVE CHECKED by trying to open and close the door. (I didn’t go and check right away because I was working, and you know, it was part of his job….)
also the dude who came out was an enormous guy and he looked at the smallish lightweight ladder I had and said “nope” when I hinted about him putting a bulb in. So I did it myself.
But at least that’s sorted.
But I maintain I shouldn’t have had to call them to come BACK. It was a really simple balancing issue the first guy should have checked.Report
Premier League starts up again tomorrow, so my Saturday mornings will now include trying to squeeze watching soccer around doing yoga with K.
One of our house guests left, so I’ve got my library back. It’s nice to have that space, I have to tell you. It was a guest room before, and sometime around January-February I decided that it was dumb to have a room dedicated to no use whatsoever 90% of the time. So we found a nice couch that converts into a decent-enough bed and moved all the bookshelves in there and it’s so pleasant that now I kind of wish I had painted the room before taking it over. But it’s nice.Report
100 square feet to oneself.
You should build a gaming computer but not tell anybody about it and hide it in there.Report
🙂 That’s…not a terrible idea…A computer in there would ruin the aesthetic, though.Report