Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Week in the Life: Sunday December 17

Hey friends, we're doing a one week experiment where we hang out each day and I'll tell you everything that's going on in my life (inspired by Stephany's Week in the Life series).  

Somehow a full week has gone by already and our time of hanging out together daily is at an end.  But that doesn't mean that you're SOL if you want more week in the life...because YES YES YES YES KIM IS DOING IT NOW!!!!!!!!!!

I sleep past 7 and stay in bed until the Hubs wakes up.  We go downstairs together and tiptoe past a heap of sleeping boys in the living room.  We make breakfast and hang out in the back room

The Mug du Jour is my other big coffee mug: What part of [elaborate music score] don't you understand?  It was funnier back when I played piano.  I gave that up a few years ago when I realized that I was never going to progress beyond where I was and every practice session just felt like it was reinforcing my mediocre music skills.  The more I think about it I actually hate the mug now, so I should find another big coffee mug that I would enjoy drinking my weekend coffee out of.  I grab another Costco breakfast sandwich out of the freezer and toss it in the air fryer.  Wordle/Spelling Bee/NYT crossword go down and blogs are read.


There's no getting around it, I've got a huge case of the Sunday Scaries.  I don't have a plan for what I want to do today and I don't want to go back to work tomorrow.  After a week of days of back to back sunshine it's gloomy and cold.

Spoiler there's no "and then this amazing thing happened that turned the day around", it's just an overall dreary day.  

Later in the afternoon I hit the grocery store for a pretty hefty haul and I'm amazed that it's only $75.  In total there have been 4 trips to the grocery this week and $150 spent which seems low.  I've skated by without going to Costco.

I restock my eggless breakfast burrito supply.  I usually don't bother to add spinach but I did this time because I made another recipe that used it.

I'm a big proponent of always having burritos in the freezer but all burritos look the same from the outside so labeling is important.  My code is unlabeled = non-breakfast burritos, BB = the egg, sausage, and potato breakfast burritos that are my gold standard, and now VBB = veggie breakfast burritos.


Then I make a tofu curry for lunches which is where the other half of the bag of spinach went.  It's a new recipe and it's kinda meh so I won't share it.  I'll keep searching for a better curry but this will do for now.


The fam takes off for their nighttime activity.  I make baked ziti which is ready by the time they come home.  The Hubs and I grab a glass of wine to go with dinner.


Another day another Advent puzzle session.

It's up to bed for the NYT crossword and reading.  Since I just finished a book the night before I need something new...or better yet an old favorite to reread.  I scan my bookshelves and pick out The Rainbow and The Rose which is another Nevil Shute novel.  I'd forgotten most of the story so it's almost entirely a new book.

For whatever reason sleep is a disaster and sleep meditations don't help...so yeech.  But that's a story for the next time we talk.

What Have We Learned Here

  • It takes me an abnormally long time to drink a cup of coffee.
  • Like I said, I've tried and failed to write day in the life posts before, so I was surprised that I was able to get into a groove and do a whole week - I'm a slow writer so I did need the "head start" of holding back Monday's post until Wednesday.  It cut into my TV watching time but what are you going to do.  
  • I think I'd like to make this an annual thing.  Next year what will be the same and what will be different?
  • Oddly I feel better about my mundane life==>that's why I'd recommend trying this out.  Also December is kind of a "heavy" month emotionally so it helped to have this project.
  • My job doesn't sound so awful written out from day to day but the core of what bugs me is here.  The morning pileups caused by the time difference that leave my head foggy.  The manual work.  The lack of a need for cognitive function on the job.  The crappy stuff that my company has done to employees in the past...yes all of these things could be worse and there's the offset of a nice paycheck, not always having to work very hard, and freedom of time for large chunks of the day.  It's a good enough job for right now but I can't wait until the day when I have satisfying work again or NO WORK. 
  • Selfishly I love reading day in the life posts and week in life even more so I'm thrilled that Kim is picking up the baton.  I'm not telling anyone else what to do but I'll just say that if I see that title pop up in my Feedly I'm going to rush to click it.
  • It's kind of NaBloPo lite project.

Thanks for hanging out everyone!

23 comments:

  1. I loved going on this ride with you, Birchy! And yes, it does take you a long time to drink a cup of coffee. I think I have drank a pot by the time you finish your cup. What can I say, I gulp it down like my life depends on it. Now that I say that, the lives of those around me depend on it.
    I have written a day in the life post before but not for a long time, and never a week in the life. Maybe I will do that! My life is pretty different from the last time I did one. Perhaps something to perk up January with! Who knows.

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    1. DO IT!!!!

      Yes it's probably a scarcity mentality that makes me drink coffee so slow.

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  2. I will say it until I am blue in the face - your food always looks so good. That is too bad about the tofu curry because it looks delish!

    Thank you so much for the shoutout and for sayin you are thrilled I am doing it too! I feel so special and encouraged to keep at it - these posts are a lot of work and DO cut in to TV time! I am so glad you did the series and stuck with it. I think doing another week in a year is a great idea!

    The mug did make me want to ask if you play piano ;)

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    1. I was so happy when I opened my Feedly this morning and saw your post! The first two days were a lot harder and then it got a bit easier and then...the week was over.

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  3. This is a fun option for blogging, but I'm afraid it wouldn't work for me, LOL. While I like my job (and most of my coworkers), I don't think it would be very entertaining for others to read. Ask me to document (sometimes in great detail) my daily fitness antics, though, and I'm down ;-)

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    1. Yes it would work for you!!! Your fitness antics are fascinating and I can only imagine what the rest of the story is.

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  4. I have LOVED this project, but I cannot imagine it being interesting for anyone to read about my days. There is a lot of sitting and typing and staring into space and more typing and existential angst.

    Your comment about hating your mug is very relatable. Isn't it wild that we can form such visceral reactions to everyday objects? I started to feel that way about this series of photographs we had on the wall in our old kitchen. I once loved them! But then they just made me mad. Now, our kitchen doesn't have any room for hanging photos, so we are repurposing the frames and the photos are gonzo.

    I am also deeply impressed by your grocery expenditures. I am the queen of spending a million dollars at the grocery store. SIGH.

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    1. Believe me $150 a week is an EXTREME RARITY.

      What you say about writing is probably why I became an accountant. It's still a lot of typing but there's no such thing as "accountant's block". The downside is...you have to do accounting. Anyway I am sure that your week in the life would be fascinating. It would certainly be well written!

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  5. I feel like my life is too scattered and boring to do this - but I did this several times in past years of blogging and they were always popular posts! Somehow I just feel self conscious about how I am NOT a morning person since basically nothing good happens before 8 am.

    And I love the mug (again) and I have the Sunday Scaries today (it's Tuesday) and had them Monday, too :( One of those weeks...GIANT SIGH.

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    1. Boo to this week if it's being one of those weeks. Hopefully the tide will turn tomorrow.

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  6. Thanks Birchie, for this glimpse into your life!
    Mundane and ordinary day-to-day life: we all have to deal with it. That's why getting a glimpse of someone else's everyday life is so interesting!

    It's the little things: what time you wake up, your first Wordle line, your breakfast, your laundry, your shopping expenses, the tedious Excel sheets...it's all part of life. And it's comforting to know we're not alone!!

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    1. You're right Catrina - it's the little things and we're not alone!

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  7. So, here's why I would never do this for a whole week. My weekdays are exactly the same.
    Wake up - SAD lamp with Duolingo
    Walk the dog
    Feed the dog
    Breakfast
    Work
    Walk the dog
    Workout
    Prepare, eat dinner
    (Spend an hour doing something - usually reading, writing or reading blogs)
    Walk the dog
    Get ready for bed
    Bed
    x5

    No one needs to read that, right?

    You (and Stephany) make it all interesting with your new Worlde words every day and funny anecdotes, but mine would literally be "here's another picture of my dog walking in the dark."

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    1. Here's the thing - if you don't want to do a week in the life series of course you don't have to, but I'd love for you to just write up a couple of days offline and see what happens. Mine was all "I made coffee, I worked out, I worked yada yada" but when I went to write it down then all of the fun stuff came through. I think that if you do that you'll get the gems like Duolingo gave you a new funny shoutout, Hannah chased a squirrel, and Zelda found a new sunny spot to lie in. Just an idea!

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  8. It was fun to read about a week in your life! I have never done this but might take a stab at it in 2024. But that would mean posting more than the paltry 2, sometimes 3, times I'm currently maintaining. Would I bore people to tears? There's only one way to find out.

    I'm kind of marveling at the variety of what you eat. I am such a creature of habit. I eat the exact same thing for breakfast every day and most weeks I eat the same thing Tues-Thur since that's when I am in the office, and if there is enough leftover, I'll eat it on Friday. Bor. Ing.

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    1. Yes do it if you can! There are always the less extreme options of just doing a day or a couple of days rather than a whole week.

      My key to "variety" is having a stockpile of leftovers in the freezer;-)

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  9. I'm so glad you did this, Birchie. I know so many people think their lives are too boring to do a week of posts like these, but we all want to get that glimpse into other people's lives and their daily habits. And nobody's life is REALLY that boring! We just think it is, but other people find it fascinating.

    The first time I did WITL, I was living at home with my mom and my dog was still alive. And nearly every year since, I've been in a different stage of life: living with a roommate, taking care of a dog while he was at the end of his life, pandemic life, etc. It's such a great time capsule of my life!

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    1. Me too Stephany! Like I said, I really enjoyed reading your WITL and that was in the middle of NaBloPo with a million great blog posts to read each day. I'm really interested to see what next year's WITL will look like - hopefully by then another dog will have adopted us.

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  10. Ha ha... I think you should make it a quarterly thing!!!
    Ugh, Sundays. Lately I've been making Sunday my day off of exercise, so I sleep in, make waffles, read blogs... I'm so happy until sometime in the afternoon there's a shift and suddenly the day sucks. Is there a solution to this??? We must find it.
    Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed this! I'm heading over to check out Kim's blog now (for some really weird reason I don't read her blog- but that's obviously about to change.)

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    1. Sundays definitely have an edge to them and it bugs me. Overall I was really surprised that my work days were the happy ones and the weekend was more down - I would have expected the opposite.

      You'll love Kim. Her blog is the most brilliant runner blog title ever - Kim Has the Runs - and she and her husband own a company called Fake Meats. Plus cats and books - she's got all of the things that I look for in a blog covered.

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  11. I have the post-NYD scaries this year - already dreading next week. Sigh. Not good. I usually love my job but feel like I got no break. (Because, well, I got no break...)
    I have loved this series - LOVED it. But I could never, ever do it because you all would think I am (more) insane (than you already do). :>

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    1. Anne, I am sure that if you did the week in the life we'd be even more fascinated. Boo to the post-NYD scaries, but yes it's only a matter of time before I'll get them too.

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  12. A NaBloPoMo lite project - yes! And so fun to read and follow along. Seriously more interesting than one usually thinks ;)

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