Week in the Life: Thursday December 14

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).  It's Thursday already???

I tell you what, I do not like how fast the days go by.  On the one hand yay that the work week is almost over but boo that I will not get this time back.  But anyway, Thursday is here again.

The Hubs and I wake up to his alarm at 6:30.  We go downstairs and I brew up my coffee. BTW have I mentioned that my husband doesn't drink coffee???  It's the strangest thing.  The Mug du Jour was a present from the Hubs for the 10th anniversary of the day we met.  Pro tip, if your significant other is a finance type that makes their living from Excel, you should certainly get them a Freak in Sheets mug.  Stepson #2 gets up at the last possible minute that he can to be ready for his 7AM pickup.

I don't work out on Thursdays, so I settle on the couch in the back room and hit Wordle and the Spelling Bee.

Now it's time to air some dirty laundry.  The Hubs and I lead largely separate laundry lives.  He likes to live on the edge and do laundry whenever, and that is not how I roll.  I do laundry on Thursdays like it's my religion.  The taller hamper is for my regular clothes, and the Milk Crate of Shame is kept in the basement and it's where my dirty workout clothes go.  I start the load for my regular clothes.  In the summer I can fit it all into one load, not so in the winter.

On days when I don't work out I like to "commute" to work by taking the long way from the downstairs couch to my office.  It's a frosty morning.

When I get back I grab a light breakfast of a cereal bar, string cheese, and grapes and head upstairs.

Ugh, today is not playing nice.  My boss's boss emailed an assignment to me with very vague instructions.  I take my best shot and then email her a question.  Her reply makes no sense. Rinse and repeat for the next three hours.  In the end it was 15 minutes of work.

From there our international payroll providers have started to send us preliminary payroll reports.  I get to download the reports and tie them out to our records, which is a fancy way of saying that I download a bunch of Excel files and type numbers into our Big Excel file.  Sometimes I get lucky and the format is such that I can have Excel do it for me.  In other cases I'm hand typing numbers.  I look at the calendar to confirm that it is in fact 2023 and remind myself that in spite of what my boss says that this is not normal.  When all is said and done 9 of our 18 providers have sent in their reports, which is much faster than it would be in any other month besides December.  Lots of places shut down over the holidays and I am all for this.  Stepson #1 comes in to see me and brings me up to date on how his finals are going.  In one class he has a 99.5 average and his teacher just gave the class an extra credit assignment that will boost their grades by 1 percentage point.  When #1 was in middle school he used to tell us that C's were fine because they were "average".  Now he's on a quest to get the highest A possible because he can.  He got higher than a 4.0 in high school because of AP classes and I think that he thinks that college is the same.  I went to the same school for my undergrad and a 90 and a 100 are both an A - I wonder if he will settle for *just* getting a 90 percent when he finds out that it's the same as a 100.

Hey lunchtime!  I could have a salad and something but I go for the Gochujang and finish it off.

 

Hey walkies!  There's still a trace of snow on the ground and it's still chilly but the yellow ball is in the sky for a third straight day so I can't complain.

I return to work and get stuff squared away.  On Thursday afternoons the company has "library hours" where you're not supposed to schedule meetings and work on professional development.  Or as I like to call it:

Now look I'm not able to pull off cleaning house on the company's dime every week but I get to do it this week.  Back when I was in college my mom knew someone who always cleaned her house on Thursday night so that the house was at its cleanest on the weekends when they were home and also so they didn't have to spend their precious weekend time cleaning.  This is simply the most genius thing I've ever heard and how I've lived my entire adult life.  Thursdays are for cleaning so that you can lie around like a slug in your pristine house on the weekends.

I vacuum the upstairs - specifically the stairs, the hallway, our bedroom, my office, and the bathrooms.  The kids are in charge of cleaning their own rooms and Hubs is in charge of cleaning his office when and/or if they want to and my position is that it's none of my business.   Then I tackle the two upstairs bathrooms while I reminisce about my single days when I lived first in a one bedroom apartment and later in a 1,100 sq ft house with one bathroom.  Now I live in a 2,400 sq ft house with three bathrooms.

The division of labor that we have is that the Hubs takes care of all yard work and maintenance things, and I take care of cleaning, most of the grocery shopping, and a lot of the cooking.  I have a steady workload and his is more unpredictable.  While I do have beef with the amount of effort that I put into cleaning a house that never seems to be clean, the fact is that I've mowed exactly once in all of our time together and have never touched a snow shovel since I sold my single girl house.

Very often I take a break between cleaning the upstairs and the downstairs but today no one is bugging me at work so I keep going and the house is clean and it will stay that way for the next five minutes.  I put all of our towels and my cleaning cloths in the laundry and let 'em rip.

Then I go back to work and get the rest of the stuff that I need to do done.  I forgot to mention it before but it turns out that my dear husband, Mr. "I have no PTO" does in fact have 3 days of PTO that he needs to use by the end of the year so he is taking the final 3 Fridays of 2023 off from work.  I'm going to support him by dipping into my bank of "flexible PTO" - that's a fancy way of saying that as long as I get my work done I can take as much vacation as I want. "Flexible PTO" also means that I'll check my email tomorrow and will most likely put in an hour of work but ya know, that's what flexible means.

Dinner time!  The fellas make chicken quesadillas out of our stash of "burrito chicken" in the freezer - a very loose riff of this recipe.  I grab a veggie burrito out of the freezer and top it with Monterrey Jack cheese, Pace Hot Chunky Salsa, Tapito hot sauce, and sour cream.  And hey-o we're not working tomorrow and we have a bottle of Jose Cuervo margaritas in the fridge so don't mind if I do.

Afterwards hubs and I take our dogwalk-without-a-dog.  He has had a DAY at work.  Long time readers of the bloggo may remember that I have had a few years of DAYS at work, to the extent that I quit my job back in August.  I expected them to show me the door but instead they showed me the money (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, THE MOST LIKELY OUTCOME IS THAT YOU WILL GET SHOWN THE DOOR).  My job is in a holding pattern where I mostly do what I'm supposed to do but I don't stress myself over the stupid stuff and keep collecting my paychecks with a tentative plan to quit in a few years (specifically July 2025) if I can't find a job that I like better in that time.  Anyway, my job has been pretty decent since my boss got back from maternity leave a few months ago and his has been rough for the past month or so.  The role reversal does not make me happy.

We're back home.  He works out, I refill my margarita and hunker down on the couch with the TV and write the bloggo.  I've got my eye on the weekend so I mix up some chocolate chip cookie dough.  It's just a little better if I make it the night before and let the dough sit in the fridge all day so that it can think about how good it will taste.

Hubs and I do the Puzzle du Jour.

I fold the last load of laundry and head upstairs for the usual shower/reading/crossword puzzle.  Hubs joins me and we turn out the light around 10:30.  The next thing I know it's Friday.  But that's a story for tomorrow.