Does anyone else get as much pleasure as I do from reading about the mundane aspects of other peoples’ lives? No? Just me? Okay, cool (ha).
As I recently mentioned, I’m obsessed with Refinery 29’s “Money Diaries” feature – partly because I find it fascinating to see what other people spend their money on on a daily basis, but mostly for the voyeuristic aspect of reading how each woman spends every hour of every day for a week. Since I enjoy reading these diaries so much, I thought it’d be fun to document my life over the course of MLK Day weekend. Here goes!
Friday evening:
5:30 PM: I worked from home today, so I’ve mostly been lounging on the couch in sweats, staring at my work laptop all day. I’m feeling grungy, so I hop into a much needed shower.
6:00 PM: Jeff arrives home, and I decide to get started on dinner: parmesan crusted chicken breast over farro with tomatoes and garlic.
7:00 PM: We sit down to dinner – delish! We eat dinner at our kitchen island most nights, and Jeff cleans up since I cooked.
7:45 PM: I crack open a bottle of white wine and settle in for an evening of TV.
Saturday:
11:00 AM: Roll out of bed. I’ve been in a bit of a (physical, not so much mental) funk lately, and I’ve been sleeping in SUPER late. I hate wasting my day like this, so I’m making an effort to get back into waking up at a normal hour. Head downstairs and catch up on some blog reading while sipping on coffee.
12:30 PM: Make a snack of brown rice cakes with almond butter; hop in the shower.
1:30 PM: Today is the day we’ve decided to de-Christma-fy our house. I decide to let Jeff hang out on our third floor for a while (I bought him a new video game for Christmas – he’s not a big video game guy, but every few months he’ll go on a kick), and start removing the ornaments from the tree. I get on a roll and end up getting pretty much everything done aside from actually taking the tree down.
5:30 PM: Jeff comes downstairs and feels terrible that I got so much done without him (I really don’t mind; I just lost track of time). As a compromise, he cleans up the (insanely huge) mess I made taking the garland down, and drags the tree outside. I continue to putter around the house, dusting surfaces where decorations had been removed.
6:15 PM: I ask Jeff to put together a new floor lamp I purchased to offset the post-holiday decoration depression. He puts it together while I re-arrange our foyer (where we put our Christmas tree). The new lamp looks shorter than I pictured it, but after I arrange everything, I decide I love it.
7:15 PM: Jeff heads back upstairs for a few while I order dinner from our favorite takeout place: a buffalo chicken salad for me, and a BBQ wrap for him. I also break down and get an order of mozzarella sticks for us to share, because I’m starving after having eaten hardly anything all day. Takeout is convenient, but it’s SUPER difficult to find anything remotely healthy, at least from the places available for delivery in our neighborhood.
8:15 PM: Dinner arrives; we eat in front of the TV (the only time we eat in front of the TV is when we get delivery) and settle in with some Netflix, followed by SNL.
Sunday:
9:00 AM: Jeff goes to pick up his usual Dunkin Donuts coffee, and discovers his car has a flat tire. Womp womp. He takes my car instead, and decides to sign us up for AAA (normally he’d just change his own tire, but his car has some kind of crazy wheel locks that make it next to impossible). He’ll have them come either take off the tire tomorrow, or tow it to Pep Boys.
11:00 AM: I drink coffee while messing around online, and ask Jeff if he wants to take a trip to Ikea today. We decide to go later in the afternoon.
12:00 PM: I’ve been wanting to deep clean our kitchen for a while, so I get started. I remove everything from all the surfaces and do a wipe down, and put all the dishes from our open shelves (we have a bookcase in our kitchen for extra storage) into the dishwasher. While the dishwasher is going, I clean the baseboards and run the swiffer wet jet over the floor.
4:00 PM: Feeling accomplished, I hop into the shower.
5:00 PM: We head to Ikea, about 30 minutes away. We’ve both been desperately wanting a new couch for a while, but are having a hard time finding one – most of the local options are big box furniture stores, and I don’t care for what they offer. I’d like to order a couch online, but Jeff (understandably) doesn’t really want to purchase a couch without being able to try it out first. I recently found a sectional at Ikea that looked promising (the Nockeby model), but when we get there neither of us find it to be very comfortable. Sigh, back to the drawing board. At any rate, I needed a shoe rack for my closet, and I also pick up a really cute artificial succulent.
6:30 PM: Head back south, listening to the Hamilton soundtrack – we’re both a little obsessed – and decide to try the new Shake Shack for dinner. It does not disappoint.
8:45 PM: Return home…debate going to a movie, but the soonest showing of what we want to see (he wants to see Rogue One, I want to see La La Land – we planned on splitting up) isn’t until after 10. We decide to stay home and try “Sneaky Pete” on Amazon Prime while sipping on red wine (for me, Jeff sips on bourbon). Jeff likes it a lot, I’m less into it. We crash at around midnight.
Monday:
10:00 AM: Wake up and lounge in bed for a while, scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. Jeff (having woken up a few hours earlier) comes into the bedroom and tells me that AAA will be here soon to work on his car. Hooray!
11:00 AM: Sip coffee while Jeff and the AAA guy are outside and Grooby is running around freaking out about the stranger. Refill my coffee and head into the living room to watch The Kitchen.
12:00 PM: Consider heading to the Y to swim laps; check the schedule and see that although there are lanes open for lap swim, there are various activities happening in the pool throughout the afternoon. I don’t feel like swimming laps while swim team practice is going on, so decide against it.
12:30 PM: Start dinner prep – I’m making a spicy apricot glazed pork tenderloin in the slow cooker, so I whip up the glaze and sear off the pork before throwing it in the crock pot with some baby carrots.
1:00 PM: Since I didn’t make it to the Y at all during the weekend, I decide to try a Tracy Anderson Method video on YouTube (I stream it through Apple TV in the living room). I make it through exactly two “actions” before I’m basically unable to move – HA, pathetic! Feeling defeated, I throw together a smoothie using a banana, a couple spoons of almond butter, some frozen stawberries, a spoonful of greek yogurt, a handful of spinach, and some unsweetened vanilla almond milk – this should hold me over until dinner. I received this immersion blender as a secret Santa gift this Christmas, and it’s perfect for single-serving smoothies. I sip on my smoothie while doing some writing.
3:30 PM: Dinner smells freaking amazing. I hop in the shower.
4:00 PM: My closet has been in desperate need of an overhaul for months and months – it’s gotten so bad that every time I grab a T-shirt off the shelf, an huge pile tumbles onto the shoe-covered floor. Oh, the joys of old houses without walk-in closets. I bought a set of velvet-covered hangers from Marshalls several months ago, and today is the day to purge and re-fold and re-hang (and put together the shoe rack I bought yesterday). This is more cleaning than I typically do in a weekend, but the house always feels so stuffy in the winter between all the dry heat and the lack of fresh air, plus I figured I should take advantage of the long weekend.
6:30 PM: Decide to call my progress “good enough” for now, and head downstairs to finish dinner. I round out the meal with a side of garlic parmesan cauliflower rice. Jeffrey comes downstairs and we sit down to eat.
7:15 PM: After cleaning up the dinner mess, I pour myself a glass of red from the bottle I opened last night, and we settle in for some TV. In bed by 10.
Sweat the Small Stuff 