This is week 103 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment. This week clocks in at about 7400 words.

Sunday (Day 714): An Unusually Lazy Day

It was raining, so #1GF! and I sat on the couch all day watching movies and home improvement shows. If I didn’t shut the TV off at 10:30PM, we’d still be watching home improvement shows right now. The only semi-productive thing that I did all day was to reorder and restock our Netflix queue to get some movies into our house that we actually want to watch.

Monday (Day 715): A Better Robot

I wrote LOR from 8AM to 7PM, cranking out 7,600 words (a bit over thirty pages of text for those counting). I had pre-written a rough draft earlier in the week in the hopes of cutting my marathon Monday writing sessions down a bit, but it didn’t seem to do much good.

I’m starting to realize that if I don’t write the framework beforehand, I write all day. If I write the framework beforehand, I write all day and the post ends up a lot longer. There was a time when these LOR posts only took a couple of hours. If only the quality went up with the time invested, my name would be a household word by now. Then, I’d be able to afford to get myself a better robot.

Tuesday (Day 716): Uncommon As A Daisy

I looked through Cooks Country and Cooks Illustrated for recipes, which isn’t all that unusual. This time, I made a list of some of the ingredients that I would need so that that I would actually be able to cook one or two of the recipes for #1GF! instead of casting recipes aside at dinner time because I lacked one or two key ingredients.

I took my list and headed out to do the food shopping. The road to the store is a fairly main coastal road, with two lanes on either side of the yellow line. I was driving along in the left lane listening to whatever was on the radio and trying to stay off of the bumpers of the Mercedes and BMW’s that don’t seem to have any sense of objects that exist outside the driver’s skin.

As I made my way through the maze of hard-braking, blinker-hating morons, the driver of a Land Rover decided to cut into my lane. They didn’t bother to check over their shoulder to notice that the space they were trying to occupy already had a car in it. In a snap, ROCKET CAR! was forced over the yellow line and into oncoming traffic. I hit the brakes, and steered back into the lane behind the SUV, who had decided then to put their blinker as an afterthought to a hard left turn in front of oncoming traffic. It zipped off down a side street.

As I drove away (grumbling a few swears, shaking my head, and labeling every Land Rover driver as being incredibly stupid), I realized that I hadn’t honked my horn. I focused more on getting out of the way than alerting the other car that she had almost smashed into my car and sent us both hurtling into oncoming traffic.

I wondered if avoiding beeping angrily and trying to resolve the situation was a good personality trait or a flaw. Do I fix situations and brush away the unnecessary confrontations, or am I simply and wordlessly correcting the mistakes of others instead of asserting simply and loudly, “I am here.” Is the dissolution of ego under pressure a positive, or a sign of weakness? I turned up the radio to drown out the question that I couldn’t answer.

I did the food shopping without a lot of philosophy. Mostly, it was trying to plan dinners and avoid buying junk food. “How did I become such a domestic little bitch,” I thought to myself while looking for a four pound chicken in a sea of five pounders. I shrugged like someone had said it to me, and it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. I was starting to think that I knew the answer to my earlier philosophical debate.

After getting home and putting away all the groceries, I went out to install a bunch of flowers in one of our new mulch beds. It seemed as if #1GF! and I had underestimated the number of flowers we needed to fill the bed, so I decided to run out and get a couple of more pots before breaking ground. I had only ten dollars, a wad of singles, and some well worn gift cards to pay with. For two pots of flowers, it was going to be close. I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to offer up this incredibly developed writer’s body that spent years percolating as a tech worker, but at the last minute, I found its equivalent in spare change on the top of my dresser.

I needed daisies to even out what we had already bought, and I briefly contemplated going back to the garden place where we bought the original flowers. I knew they’d have them, but I wasn’t driving an hour for two damned pots of daisies. Daises seemed like something everyone would have.

I went to the local home store, and they didn’t have any. I cost me a half hour to figure out that I was wrong. I headed to a garden center that I thought might have them, but turned around and headed for home when I was halfway there. I didn’t want to waste any more time. I didn’t know how long planting would take because I’ve never planted flowers before. And I wasn’t sure whether #1GF! actually wanted more daisies. I figured that daisies would probably work, but I thought that #1GF! might want to be involved in the process.

I headed home and mowed the lawn to give myself a quick check mark. I put the mower away, and within an hour of starting on the planting, I had daisies, Coreopsis, and daylillies in the ground. In a matter of weeks, they would unleash their flowered fury in an attempt to distract people from the potholes in my lawn (weaw weaw weaw “Potholes In My Lawn“).

Things were going a lot faster than I expected, which is always feels pretty good when doing chores. I leaned on the shovel and looked across my lawn. I suddenly realized that I had only mowed three quarters of the lawn. I have no idea why I stopped. I made a mental note to fix that issue later on and then erased a small portion of the check mark that I had given myself for completing the task earlier.

What I was more concerned with is the big blank space in the mulch bed where where more flowers needed to go. I decided that it would be a better surprise to have the whole bed finished by the time #1GF! got home than to give her the option of flower approval once she got home.

I ran in the house and grabbed Christopher Moore’s Fool to return to the library. I was 200 pages in, but unlike his other books, I really didn’t care how it ended. I wanted to get it returned before it was due, and the library was on the way to the garden center.

I pulled into the library parking lot, and drove up to the book drop. I leaned out the window and shoved the book into the large aluminum container. I didn’t have to open the door or undo my seat belt. It took a small amount of grunting, but you have to take the small victories where you can.

I drove on to the garden center, and got stuck in traffic. The road signs said that the road would be closed up ahead, but it wasn’t. I passed four police officers spaced at even intervals at the side of the road. Most of them had their thumbs in their belts and none were doing anything but stare straight ahead from behind their sunglasses.

I was going slow enough that I didn’t have to slow down to pull safely into the gravel parking lot of the garden center without coming close to some hot rally car action. I asked the guy if they had any daisies, and he didn’t think that they did. I was about to leave when a woman found some of them for me. I plunked down just enough crumpled bills for two pots before heading home.

Within twenty minutes of getting home, the flowers were installed in the mulch bed, making it look normal. I took another check mark for my day. “Installed” was the word that I used in my notes, so I thought that I’d keep it as the chosen word. You can take a tech worker out of tech, but…

I went down to the basement, and picked up the mower to drag it outside. The robot sat under the window and didn’t budge. He didn’t turn or anything. He didn’t seem to be sleeping, and I think he may have been jealous of the lawn mower because it got to travel the yard despite having no obvious source of power that wasn’t human generated.

I mowed the section of grass that I missed, and then weed whacked all the little bastard pieces of grass that refused to submit to my human powered mower. I restored my previously erased mental check mark, and gave myself another for weed whacking.

#1GF! came home while I was finishing up, and brought me an iced coffee. She felt guilty about not helping. I think pregnancy is more difficult than mowing grass, but she doesn’t consider making a baby to be a legitimate activity.

While I finished weed whacking, #1GF! pulled up weeds by hand. I told the woman not to touch the damned grass because she shouldn’t be messing around anywhere near fertilizer. I pulled up as many weeds as I could to keep her from getting to them because she sometimes only pretends to listen to me until I stop paying attention.

We sat on the porch looking out at the yard, sort of planning the way it should look, sort of enjoying the sun. I walked her around the house to show her all the different flowers that seem to be sprouting out of our yard, with no help or planning from us. We sat back on the stoop again enjoying the last bit of sun before it dipped behind the canopy of leaves. I think I like our yard a lot more than I once did. I’m going from wanting to completely tear things up, to wanting to rearrange and improve what’s there instead.

Once I cleaned the dirt off myself and changed, I made Teriyaki chicken from a recipe out of Cook’s Country. I think it’s the first recipe out of the magazine that I haven’t been crazy about. It wouldn’t have been bad if if were less salty, but it wasn’t as good as I had expected.

Wednesday (Day 717): The Old Man And His Hose

I went through e-mail and stats in the morning, and then added another tab to Michelle’s site to cover her expanding list of subject matter. I thought about the kitchen site and how I’m simply waiting for a couple of things from the kitchen folks just to finish it up. I thought about chasing them down for the info I needed, but I put it aside because when it’s a priority for them, it’s all ready to go.

I went outside to water the plants, and made a few phone calls so that I would feel less like an old man who makes watering flowers a priority. No one picked up, so I was not only an old man who made watering flowers a priority, but an old man who’s only friends were some ungrateful flowers who drank up all of his water. If I had some tapioca, then I would’ve sulked and ate it in from a clear glass dessert bowl while I sat in my recliner reading a large print book. Alone. With only Lawrence Welk and the bubbles to keep my company.

I had no tapioca, so I put away the hose and went in to write a little LOR. Maybe it’s that I’m typing like mad while letting the creative part of the brain awaken at its own pace, but LOR seems to get me warmed up for book writing. After roughing out a few days of notes, I threw another 3300 words into the book.

While trying to figure out how many words I had written that day, I noticed that yWriter (a free book writing program) will not only keep track of the number of words that you’ve written in total, but will tell you the number of words you’ve written that day. It’s a handy tool for creating a realistic writing schedule that you can stick to.

I put a little more into LOR and finished up writing at quarter to six. #1GF! came home soon after, and we ate leftovers and watched Mad Men until bed.

Once we were settled into bed, #1GF! told me about how she was getting worried about getting all the rooms done before the baby sucked up all our attention and energy. I wound right up into thinking and planning mode, which is not the place for me to be while trying to get to sleep.

I lay there trying to line up all the things that needed to be done to make room for the little one. Wiring had to be done, blinds put up, doors hung, cribs built, and three rooms had to have their contents completely rotated. I thought we had plenty of time, but I didn’t want #1GF! worrying about it.

The more I thought about it, the less time it seemed that we had. There was a lot of staring into the darkness planning things until I simply gave up, and resolved to get whatever #1GF! was worried about completed as soon as possible. The resolve acted like a line of sandbags against the flood of ideas that refused to subside, and I fell asleep.

Thursday (Day 718): Humanitarian Aid To Tallsylvania

I drove #1GF!’s mother to her appointment in the morning, and on the way back, I tried to call my barber. He didn’t answer his phone, so I decided to stop by his shop on the way to do some errands. He will usually squeeze me in between appointments, but he was swamped and I had to set up an appointment for Friday. I didn’t mind. You can’t expect to get in all the time.

I drove all the way out to You Do It Electronics to pick up more wire and a few extra jacks to wire up what would be the new location for my office. Traffic on the highway was at a dead standstill, which isn’t something that I have to deal with every day.

After I put on my blinders and got only what I needed from the Massachusetts mecca of electronics, I went to a home megastore to pick up a retrofit box for the wall. I walked around looking at various items for projects that need to be done around the house, and happened to walk through the paint section. A lady was reaching for spray paint on a high shelf. Her daughter was watching her from the front of the carriage. She turned to a nearby clerk and said “Excuse me…”

The clerk walked away as if he hadn’t heard, although he seemed to be closer than I was. She rolled her eyes and looked at me like she needed a nail pounded in and had just found a shoe that resembled a hammer. “Hey, could you reach up there and get me a can of spray paint? I can’t reach it, and you seem tall.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said as I reached up on the shelf and bumbled a couplr of cans around. If the lady didn’t reach up and stop one of them, it would’ve ended up on my head.

I pulled down the can and handed it to the woman. “There you go.” The woman had to be five foot ten. “Geez. I’ll bet you don’t have to ask a lot of people to get you things off of high shelves.”

“Um, no,” she said.

“Because you’re pretty tall,” I said as if the woman had just moved here from Tallsylvania and didn’t realize that she was considered tall next to the lilliputian natives that typically inhabited the area.

She smiled in that “nice observation, but I have to go” half smile that women give guys like me when they realize that that I’m probably socially retarded, hiding a Star Trek uniform in his car, or both. I started to walk away.

“Oh this isn’t semi-gloss,” she said frowning at the can.

I turned back. “You want me to grab another one?”

“No, that’s ok.”

“Who’s the man, mommy?” said the little girl.

I tilted my head and raised my eyebrows in the universal facial gesture that accompanies the offer, “You’re sure?”

“Yea, I’m fine. Thanks.”

I shrugged and walked off toward the blinds, leaving the tall woman to fend for herself on the higher shelves. I grabbed six blinds and asked the guy to cut them to fit the windows in my new office. Here’s a tip for you: faux wood blinds don’t cut like regular blinds. Regular blinds take ten seconds to cut. I had to wait for over a half hour for the wood ones. As I waited, I suddenly hoped that the woman in the paint aisle knew that I was merely trying to being helpful, and not trying to pick her up.

I decided to call #1GF!, lest I was suddenly dragged into a sweaty storeroom by a crowd of single mothers who had heard about the nerdy guy who was shopping for a ready made family in the paint section of local home improvement stores. Maybe #1GF! could call for help or something.

I talked to #1GF! on the phone while I waited for the blinds, and I mindlessly flipped through rug samples. I eventually asked if we could get Astroturf for the yard. I don’t know if it was the ridiculous turn that the conversation was taking or the constant whine of the blind cutting machine in the background, but #1GF! opted to give up on the call and go back to work. I couldn’t blame her.

I grabbed the blinds and headed for the register. On the way, I checked the price on a box of cat 5e. I was surprised to find that it was $4 cheaper than at You Do It. Sure, You Do It was $1 less per jack, but I would’ve broken even and saved myself a long trip by just going to the home megastore in the first place.

I packed the blinds into the car and headed home. On the way, I dropped into the library for a book. I quickly grabbed another Christopher Moore novel and headed out.

When I got to the beach, it was completely packed. The weather was in the 80’s and the crosswalks choked off the traffic with young girls in bikinis and shuffling their flip flops across the street next to their clomping, ten degree hat tilt boyfriends. At one such stop, a young guy waiting for takeout yelled something to me.

“Go fish?”

I turned down the radio. “What?”

“Blow fish?”

I shut the radio off and was missing some pop travesty that blamed everything on the a a-a-a a-alcohol. “What, now?” I asked.

“Oh six?” the kid repeated for the third time.

He was asking the age of ROCKET CAR!. “It’s an ‘05,” I said, while trying not to show that I was impressed with the kid for getting that close. I resisted giving him a thumbs up or any sort of hand gesture, although it was pretty difficult.

By 2PM, I had passed through the youthful summer bounce of the beach and was safely back home. I had a little lunch, made a little coffee, and checked my mail. I settled in to warm up my writing with a little LOR before starting into the book.

I worked on the book until 7:30, but only came up with a couple of thousand words. I finally broke the 20k word mark though, which I was a pretty neat milestone. Eighty pages roughed out, a couple of hundred to go.

Friday (Day 719): The Wyld Stallyn And The Hungry Robot

I left the house early to go get a haircut. It went like it’s gone every few weeks for the last twenty years: an hour of catching up punctuated with some hair cutting. My barber and I got to talking about being tied down, and he mentioned that he wasn’t sure about being tied down to a woman at this stage of his life. “Yea, I hear you. You can’t tame us, Bob. Men like us can’t be tied down. Wild stallions have to run free.”

I was a bit dramatic about it and let it hang in the air. We both burst out laughing, and had a good laugh at the two wild stallions who might be able to come up with a pick up line if we had access to the internet, a telephone, and a couple of books on good pick up lines.

Once my hair was returned to the same configuration that I’ve grown used to over the last fifteen years, I took a walk with my barber because he’s supposed to get a little more exercise than he’s getting. We talked about police chases and bits of excitement that happened long ago as we walked. We laughed, shook hands, and he headed back into his shop to wait for his next appointment.

I headed for home. I missed a bridge opening, but ended up getting stuck in construction traffic anyway. I had no idea it was construction, and the temperatures were already climbing, so I thought that there was a ten mile backup to get to the beach. I briefly dreaded leaving home for anything in the summer. When I passed by the road work, I sighed a bit, feeling that the beach wasn’t as popular as I thought. When I passed through town, they were already charging for parking and some lots were already full. The beach is plenty popular. Even if it doesn’t generate ten mile backups.

When I got home, did a quick check of my e-mail, and had a hard time deciding on what to get started on. There was a list of things that were making #1GF! nervous, and looking at them all at the same time was like staring into a messy teenagers room and wanting to clean it. There was no good place to start, so I jumped in.

I grabbed the drill and level and installed the six blinds in my new, more space-efficient office. Hanging blinds isn’t difficult work, but it took me about two hours to get through them. And I haven’t even tackled the OCD task of cutting and leveling the blind cords. I cleaned up all the boxes and spare screws and took them down to the basement.

I pulled down some insulation to run a new cable TV line to the new den (our current office) and got a mass of plaster dust to the head. I sneezed, and the robot looked as if he were trying not to laugh. I raised my eyebrows at him and he looked at the pile of dirt at my feet. Then he looked at me. Then the dirt. Then at me. He was dying to get at that dirt. “Later, I said. I have some stuff to do. We’ll clean this up later.” The robot looked dejected (well, as much as a robot can look dejected) and turned back to guard his window.

I went upstairs and wired the cable TV jack in the new den. I frowned at the four cat 5 jacks that would probably idle in that den until they were as archaic as cat 3.

I went into the current office and cut a hole in the wall for the new network jacks and phone line. I returned to the basement, and pulled down all the insulation that would get in the way for running the new lines. I was going to drill up through the floor to have everything set up for running cable, but I was alone. I like to have someone tap something inside the wall before I drill just to make sure that my measurements line up with the sound. It’s a little overkill, but it’s a secondary safeguard to keep from drilling through a floor instead of a wall.

I went back upstairs, cleaned up all the dust around the newly cut hole in the wall, and made myself a pot of coffee. I made it as more of a bonus for getting things done than an elixir for keeping things going. With the upstairs clean for when #1GF! got home, I returned to the basement to pull three new cat 5 lines to the new office.

After a couple of hours, the lines were 90% run. I would tack the lines the rest of the way once I got a hole drilled up to the office. And that would require brief help from #1GF!. My nose was running like a faucet because I released a ton of dust when I pulled down all the insulation. At one point, while my hands were occupied with lines, I could feel my nose dripping on my arm as if I had just gotten out of a wet pool. It was a time I was glad to be working alone.

I wanted to have all the lines done by the time #1GF! got home, but I the only way that was going to happen was if I rigged up a complicated pulley system to tap inside the hole for me. I thought about it, but realized that by the time it was rigged up, #1GF! would be home and she would have a lot of superflous questions about the strings running all over the house. I decided that it would be a lot less trouble to wait for her to lend a hand.

Somehow in all the excitement, I not only lost a hammer, but completely missed the second bona fide beach day of the year. I swear that I do more without a boss because there’s no one to tell me when to quit. I went outside and watered the grass and flowers so that something would grow and draw attention away from our brown spotted chunk of heaven. Once the ground was soaked, I came in and started in on LOR.

I finished writing at 6:30. I still needed to drill a hole and terminate the cat 5 lines, but I was waiting on #1GF! to get home to finish up. Oddly, I was intending on making a couple of desserts and cleaning the bathroom, but I was pretty much out of time.

My nose was running like a faucet, and it was annoying the hell out of me. Despite the coffee, I started to run out of will power. Having a clogged head and a nose that’s running everywhere makes me feel like I’m sick. And that makes me lazy.

I went out to grab the mail while waiting for #1GF! to get home, and sitting outside my front door was a brown paper package. I opened it up. Inside, n01a had packed not only a single cup coffee maker and some filters to keep me from making and drinking whole pots of a particularly dark and delicious caffeinated beverages, but he also stuck in a response to 2005’s CD Challenge. The whole package made my day.

It’s always been a little easier for me to relate through music, and the CD challenge was designed to let me get to know readers a little through music. The idea is to put together a CD of your favorite songs, even if they’re completely uncool. I don’t care if I like or hate them as long as the person who put them on the disc loves them. I think one dude slipped George Michael into his CD, and even though I was laughing and shaking my head through the track, I thought that guy had balls of steel for including it.

I haven’t gotten a CD challenge CD in a long, long time. And while I know that this is like giving a kid a new toy and having him play with the box, I was even more psyched about the CD than the coffee maker.

If you’ve ever sent in a CD challenge CD, I never skipped a song, and I still have the disc. I probably still have the envelope that you sent it in. I’ve always wondered if I should anonymously post the contents of the CD’s that people have sent, but that goes against the CD being sort of a private, “Hey, I’m out here” from the reader to me.

So, I got a free one cup coffee maker and a CD from one of my long-time readers. It tied the world outside my door to the world inside my screen. And that was pretty damned cool.

When #1GF! got home, I showed her the gift, and she thought it was pretty awesome too. “That is really nice of him,” she said in a sort of “awww” voice that girls reserve for when you give them flowers because it’s Tuesday.

“I know,” I said. “I don’t know what I could send back.”

“A nice thank you note?” suggested #1GF!.

“Or, what about a mug with a picture of me making coffee with the coffee maker into a mug that has a picture of me making coffee with the coffee maker on it.” #1GF! stared like she wasn’t getting the pure genius of the idea. I continued on. “Inside that picture will be a tiny picture of me making coffee with the coffee maker on a mug that has a picture…” #1GF! left the room. “It goes on forever,” I called after her. “Pretty clever, right? RIGHT?”

“I love you,” she called back as if she didn’t intend to acknowledge the sheer awesome power of my brilliance.

I smiled at the coffee maker and turned the CD over in my hand. “So cool,” I thought. I called after #1GF!, “I’m going to punch down the jacks and then clean up.”

I went into the tiny cell that would be my office. I wondered if #1GF! was secretly trying to make my writing area less comfortable so that I was more motivated to get a job. It would be a mighty sneaky move, but women are crafty. I put it out of my mind and unwound the colored strands of the cat 5 to punch it down to the jack.

I grabbed an Asimov paperback and put it on the floor to take the weight of the punchdown tool instead of driving the jack into the shiny new surface of my wood floor. An old paperback is pretty much standard equipment next to the crimpers, wire cutters, and a punchdown tool when punching down data jacks at home. In twenty minutes, the jacks were terminated at the wall and the panel, and a slightly dented Foundation novel was returned to the bookshelf to resume its role as an ordinary book. I hooked up a PC on the floor, and #1GF! tested the connectivity while I finished up.

My nose had finally stopped running, so I went to the basement to put all the insulation back up and vacuum up all the dust that had fallen from the job. I walked over to the robot, and he seemed to know what was coming. He looked at me and looked at the pile of dirt. He then looked at me again. I thought he was going to burn a fuse.

“Yep. That’s right.”

The robot rolled toward the pile of dust and I caught him by the cord, spinning him completely around and nearly pulling his top off. “Easy, pal. I have to plug you in. You’ll never clean all that up on your backup battery. The robot went back to staring at the pile of dust that was just out of reach.

“Hold on. Hold on,” I said keeping a grip on the orange cord and plugging it in to the wall with my other hand. I flipped on the robot’s power and he attacked the pile. He moved on to the next pile, and then started cleaning up muddy tracks that I had left by the door. He seemed like he was having such a good time that I had to smile.

I looked around the basement, and it looked like the robot might’ve kicked up a little more dust with his exhaust. “He couldn’t kick up that much dust,” I thought.

“Robot, where’s your filter?” I said over the robot’s engine. The robot dove for another muddy boot print.

I pulled the robot back and flipped his switch. He was still straining to get at another footprint. “Robot, where is your filter?” I said again.

The robot’s eye turned to a sonar scope complete with a rotating white line that would ping whenever it hit the single white dot that occupied it.

I sighed. “Robot. Is your filter engaged?” The robot’s eye turned yellow and then went to red. More expensive robots don’t rely on traffic light style communications systems, but I have the the worst robot ever.

I looked around the basement and saw the filter sitting on the floor. It had been removed the last time that the robot was on water cleanup duty. “Aren’t you supposed to engage your filter to prior to picking up dust?” His eye went green. “Did you engage the filter?” His eye went red. He seemed almost proud for knowing the answers. “Do you see the dust storm that has formed in the basement?”

The robot rolled behind the brick furnace flue and pulled a five gallon bucket in front of him. He then attempted to lash himself to the flue with his power cord. I grabbed the cord.

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa,” I said trying to stop the madness. “Self preservation mode off.” The robot stopped.

#1GF! called down the stairs. “Who are you talking to down there?”

I pointed at the robot and he tried pretending that he was sleeping.

“Nothing,” I called toward the stairs. “No one. Just cleaning up. I’ll be up in a minute.”

The basement door closed. I whispered at the robot. “Do you really think that a friggin’ dust storm has formed inside the house? In the basement? And that it’s going to be powerful enough to carry you off? I mean do you think this is Tatooine or something?”

The robot’s eye opened slightly as if I couldn’t possibly know that he was only pretending to sleep. His eye lightly flashed green five times. They were dim flashes, which were the robot’s idea of quiet.

“Are you kidding me right now?” His light turned red.

I shook my head and looked up at the insulation above my head. “Shut down for maintenance,” I commanded. The robot pretended to shut down. “Do it.” The robot’s hum faded to nothing as he shut down. I unplugged the robot, screwed his filter back into place, and reassembled him.

“Robot. Boot and resume normal protocol.” The robot whirred to life. After a brief systems check, he turned to the guard a basement window that hadn’t leaked in months. He then promptly fell asleep.

“Worst robot ever,” I said under my breath as I turned to walk up the stairs.

Saturday (Day 720): The Incredible Shrinking Office

The first thing I did after I got up was to disassemble my desk and move it from its luxurious eleven foot space with ocean views to the humble six foot spare room. The desk is a five foot square, so it fit just fine, but it was certainly a downgrade. The den would move into the office and the baby would get the room formerly known as the den. There were easier ways to rearrange things, but this rotation of rooms made the most sense in the long run.

I unscrewed the top of the desk from the bases and prepped it for moving. Once it’s broken down, all the pieces can easily be moved by one person. #1GF! felt guilty that she couldn’t help, so she polished the desk and sort of hovered. After a couple of gentle warnings that she should evacuate the area, she went to do other things.

As soon as I had the bases arranged in the small room, I realized that I probably should have hooked up the spare cat 5 line in the wall as a phone line. If I didn’t do it before the top was on the desk, it wasn’t going to get done.

I apologized to #1GF! and ran out to the local home megastore to pick up a phone jack. Unfortunately, they weren’t alerted that I was coming, so they didn’t have jacks in stock that would fit into the jack system that I bought at their competitor’s megastore. I left and stopped in to get gas on the way home. It looked like my gliding the car down hills the previous week gained me a bit better gas mileage. Hey, you have to find wins somewhere.

I was going to head for the home megastore that was an hour round trip, but called #1GF! to see if she wanted to tag along to look at plants or something while I picked up the jack. She did. I drove home and picked her up. She looked surprisingly good for a woman that had been up to her ears in dust and sweatpants when I left 45 minutes before.

We made the trek to the next home store together, and I picked up the jack. Within a couple of minutes, we were in the garden center looking at plants for the yard. They had rows and rows of flowers in the parking lot, so we walked out of the store to look at them. About halfway through, I realized that I was still holding the jack and was well outside the confines of the store. No one bothered to stop me. Instead of feeling like a crafty criminal who had gotten away with something, my first thought when I realized what I had done was to think that the store needed better security policies. I had walked past several employees and two cash registers with the jack plainly in my hand and no one bothered with me.

#1GF! didn’t decide on any flowers, and said she’d get something when I wasn’t around. I guess I present too many options instead of narrowing down choices. We went back in and paid for the jack, and the cashier chastised us for having only a single jack and nothing else. I didn’t chastise her for letting me wander around the parking lot with merchandise.

When we got home, I punched down the phone jack and switched out the wall plate in my snug new office space. If in the future my writing suddenly becomes short or lacks certain letters or punctuation, it’s because I can’t reach certain keys and am typing like a velociraptor. I went to the basement, and punched the phone line down to the panel. I had a dial tone, so I set up the desk and hoisted the five foot wood top into place. I managed to get it together without destroying anything or losing any blood.

The old office was almost empty enough to accept den furniture, so I went in to the den and tried to visualize how I could navigate an eight foot sleeper sofa through my house by myself. It seemed possible, although improbable, given that it took three guys to squeeze it into the room it currently occupied. Needless to say, I didn’t come up with a reasonable plan.

#1GF! was getting upset over some unwanted pregnancy related side effects, and I did the best I could to calm her down. She went for a nap soon afterward. I went back to staring at the couch and measuring doorways to see if I could actually move it by myself. I had the couch cushions piled high on the floor, but gave up once I realized that moving a couch by myself would definitely wake a sleeping #1GF! who really could use the sleep.

I put all the cushions back, and turned on the TV. I couldn’t make noise, and my office was off limits, so there wasn’t much that I could do that didn’t involve me making noise. I ended up rather bored, but it was short term and in my baby mama’s best interest.

#1GF! got up after an hour and was feeling a lot better. It was already after 7PM, and I wanted to get dinner out of the way.

“Ok, so what do you want for dinner?” I asked a #1GF! who was less groggy than you’d expect for someone who had just woken up.

“I dunno, what do you want for dinner?”

This volley was repeated a couple of times of times. “What about Ramen noodles?” suggested #1GF! because of the simplicity of its preparation.

I was careful not to scoff, given her mood before her nap, but I was scoffing on the inside. “Ramen is for when you have no time or energy for cooking. We have time.”

“Well, what then?”

“Why not make a broccoli alfredo and throw it over pasta. It’s a real meal, and it’ll be ready by the time the pasta water’s boiled.”

#1GF! agreed and I was already on my way to the kitchen. I took out a couple of pans and she made her way to the other side of the counter. I was suddenly the only one within range of any cooking or refrigerating apparatus.

#1GF! had the phone in her hand. “I’m going to call my mother,” she said. And as an addendum that wasn’t really a question, “if you don’t mind.”

I looked at her and figured out what was happening. My face twisted up in a slack jawed distaste of a kid who has just figured out that there is no Santa. “Holy shit. I see what’s happening here. You think I’m your bitch.”

She smiled. “Oh, I do not.”

“Oh, you do. I mention dinner, and suddenly, even though it’s the weekend, I’m cooking it while you go talk on the phone. You’re not even thinking about cooking.”

She laughed as she dialed. “You seem to have it under control,” she said as she walked toward the other end of the house. I shook my head.

After dinner we watched Valkyrie, a movie about an assassination attempt on Hitler. It wasn’t bad, but if you know any history, you already know how the movie is going to end. It’s hard to get invested and root for people who have zero possibility of success. To get invested, there has to be some slim chance that the heroes might actually win.

What I Learned

• Home improvement shows are pretty addictive, but they don’t really leave you with a lot of useful information.
• If I don’t rough out LOR before hand, I write all day. If I rough out LOR before hand, I write all day and the post ends up a lot longer.
• Daisies are less common than I thought.
• LOR seems to be a warm up for book writing.
• Check the dust filter before your run the shop vac.
• To get invested in a movie, there has to be some slim chance that the hero might actually be victorious.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

Posted in Leisure