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.