A Day in the Life

On Sundays, Nightingale meal preps for the week.  Her day starts with trips to Aldi, Kroger and occasionally Costco.  Meanwhile, I do her laundry.  I use to do all the laundry but I've found that it's easier to break it up over the week, especially since we all have our own laundry baskets, which we mostly keep separated.

On Mondays, I clean up the kitchen of anything that couldn't go in the dishwasher overnight.

Thursdays are usually pasta for dinner, and Fridays are pizza night, usually frozen.  Boris gets cheese, Natasha gets pepperoni, and NG and I share a Detroit-style.

I spent the lion's share of this week power washing the detached garage, among other things.  It looks good, but that won't last, but that doesn't mean you don't do it.  That is a direct quote from Nightingale In fact, I should do it more often.  

I'm slowly knocking off a lot of little things on the To-Do List.  I have a very short window before the weather becomes unbearable to do anything outside.  In fact, it seems to have gotten warmer sooner than in previous years.

I've managed to lose about 15 lbs, but  I don't recommend anyone do it the way I did.  I've cut back on fried food and eat more salads for lunch.  I have also managed to run three times since buying those expensive running shoes last month.  But the game changer that I don't recommend was a bout of food poisoning one Saturday last month ( before the shoe purchase).  I couldn't keep anything down, not even water.  It was 24 hours of misery.

Always Something to Remind You

I have a couple of email subscriptions that do me no good down here.  More specifically, I get emails from Binny's Beverage Depot, Peoria Packing Company, and the Polish Museum of America. I could easily unsubscribe from all of them (except the PMA because they are luddites and you to email them) but I choose not to.

I also get emails from Zillow, Redfin, and other Real Estate entities that tell me my house in PP is worth X more than when I bought and sold it.  

Finally, I get the Book of Faces Memories, which used to be called On This Day after they bought it from TimeStamp.    

Those hurt.  

I really miss my Chicago house.  Yes, it had some warts.  No Central Air conditioning, the bedrooms were small and the bathrooms needed some work.  But I had finally got my garage the way I wanted it.  

But I'm trying to see a positive or at least something to hope for.   In the late 80s, my mom took me out of college because she fell into financial ruin, and instead of making the smart decision to apply for what was then abundant financial aid, she decided to just take me out of college.  There's more to that, but I won't go into it now.  

 And I wasted spent a lot of the 90s trying to get back to that life.  I seriously, naively, believed that some of the people I went to Northeast Missouri State University with actually cared about me.  

Have you ever been on a Stealth Date

 Have you ever been on a Stealth Date?  A Stealth Date is when someone thinks you and one of their friends would be perfect together, so they get both of you to go to something with them, but then your friend either doesn't show or disappears.

It took me 26 years to realize I was on a stealth Date back in 2000.  Mostly because I haven't really thought about that morning or dwelt on it for 26 years.  It's also possible I've been on other Stealth Dates that I wasn't aware of, because it's right there in the name.  Plus, I'm naive, and we Neurodivergents tend to initially take people at face value.  

Winnie, Stephanie, and I were supposed to go to a Street Art Fair one Saturday morning.  We agreed to meet at the Ogilvie Metra Center because they would be taking the Metra downtown.  When I got there, Stephanie said that Winnie had called her earlier and said she couldn't make it.

I didn't think anything of it at the time.  Now Stephanie happened to have forgotten her wallet, so she may or may not have been in on the Stealth Date thing, but I didn't think much about it at the time.  I really only paid for the water taxi downtown and a cup of coffee; she didn't want anything else.  We also somehow skipped the Art Fair and just walked through Crate & Barrel.

The thing is, Stephanie had a boyfriend, so I wasn't even in Pursuit Mode.  I tend to stay in my lane, like that.  I only saw Stephanie one more time that year.  She came to a party I had at my apartment, but didn't stay long.  I don't remember her last name or much about her, so I cannot really look her up.  Winnie and I also didn't stay friends.  She was just a little too weird even for me.  

Has it been 17 years already?

This time of year used to make me Wiggy.  Yes, that's the technical term.  It was around this time of year in 2009 when Finance 1.0 left me abruptly.  As the years went by and Time did the Heavy Lifting, along with building a life with Nightingale, I thought less and less about it.  It's really only the Memories on Facebook and a specific Taylor Swift song that ever really make me think of those events.  

When it happened, I told a very small subset of friends -- my inner circle if you will -- what had happened.  But I didn't share with the world until May 1st, 2009, which also was on a Friday.  Because somehow not telling anyone made it seem not really.  

From the time D and I broke up until I met Nightingale, I went through a "when I'm alone I want to be with people and when I'm with people I want to be alone" phase.

Edit from the Future:  who would have guessed that 5 years and a few days later, I would also be announcing on the Book of Faces that Nightingale and I were having twins.  

Down to Less Than Three Bucks a Day

Time to update the Cost per Day for the Drama Playset.  We have now owned the Drama Playset since January 14, 2022, or 1553 days.

Now the local cousins don't come over as much as they used to, but Boris swings literally every day, and Natasha joins him sometimes, especially when our pseudo third child is around.  So I'm going to keep using the previous formulas with some tweaks.

Conservative Estimate: I'm assuming that 2 kids using the playset on most days equals 1 kid using it daily.  Also, we have had an additional kid for most of the year.

So, using the Time and Date Duration Calculator to figure out the time between January 14, 2022, when it finally arrived, and today this year, I get 1553 days.  

That works out to $6000/1553 = $3.86 per use.

Slightly Optimistic Estimate: If we get more optimistic, we can assume that 3 kids using the playset most days equals 2 kids using it every day.

That works out to $6000/1553/2 = $1.93 per use.

If we take the average of these two values, we get the more likely CPU of $2.90.

Other Entertaining Outside Activities

So as we have now owned this for 4 years and some change, it costs $2-3 bucks a day to keep my kids entertained and off their iPads.

Got my First Troll on Quora

I answered a question on Quora, and at the bottom of the post, like many other Quorans, I said, "If you liked this answer, give me an upvote."  It seems to have worked because this is the most upvoted answer I've ever had.  It's likely more that it was posted to a very active space, and the question is getting a lot of answers.

Anywho, someone commented, "I block upvote beggars" and did so.  I went and looked at her profile, and as you can imagine, she has a whacky About Me which implies she thinks she's more sought after than reality would suggest.  

"And asking me to upvote and follow is the fastest way to earn a mute and block. Don’t be tacky. Earn your upvote."

As she blocked me, I could not reply to her comment.  If I could, I would say something like: 

I didn't beg, I asked.  Unless my answer got sent directly to you somehow, I didn't personally ask you for an upvote.  I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know about this rule of yours that you feel should carry the day,  especially since other Quorans do it all the time.  You could have just scrolled past or silently blocked me, and I'd continue blissfully in not even knowing you exist.  

But I guess that is the point, isn't it.  You want attention and the last and only word.  Well, go peddle crazy somewhere else, we're all filled up here.

Good Bye March, Hello April

 For almost the entirety of March, we were able to function with the heat and AC set to OFF.  We were even able to sleep with the windows open, and it was some of the best sleep I've had since the kiddos arrived!

There were 2 cold snap days, and a few mornings I needed to run the heat for an hour so the kids could defrost and get to school.  And toward the end of the month, we did have a few above-average hot days when AC was desired.  These were offset by us going out of town for a weekend and being able to leave the Nest set to ECO.  

Alas, the temps are steadily creeping up and I have a small window to do any outdoor/garage projects before the Southern Summer begins (in Mid-May). 

The Running Shoes  

As soon as I got home from dropping Moose and Squirrel off at school, I changed into my running clothes and went for what passes for me running these days.  It was my second run since buying the new shoes.  Anyway, I managed to eke out another 1-mile run, slightly faster than the first one.  More importantly, I ran longer than I walked.

Date Distance Pace Time

04-01-2026    1 mile 11:35   11:42 

03-23-2026    1 mile 12:04   12:22 

On the first run, it took a quantum of seconds to get the Strava App to pause, so the Time was probably at least 10 seconds faster. By the way I really hate the Strava app and website.  it is hard to navigate and it is constantly trying to sell you the pay version.  Since my data lives here, I'm stuck with it for a while.  If the running thing takes off and gets anywhere in the neighborhood of consistency, let alone what it once way, I'll look for a better tool.