A Day in the Life

About six times a year by my reckoning I am left completely alone at home.  Completely.  No wife, no children, no nothing except me, my books, a teevee, a refrigerator, and, of course, work the next day.  Now don’t get me wrong – I love my wife and children.  But I am by nature an introvert, and introverts by nature need about two to three hours of solitary isolation for every hour spent in contact with extroverts.  My wife and children are all extroverts.  Extreme extroverts.  Though there’s some hope for Little One.

So six times a year I am by myself.  Four or five of those times occur during the week sandwiching the Fourth of July the wife takes the little ones to South Carolina to visit her parents.  I work that week (’cuz we need the money; I actually love South Carolina – and everyone lets me disappear to do my own thing). During the nights I feed myself, read, watch some movies, maybe a baseball game or two, drink a few beers, and chill.  Last summer I painted Patch’s room pink.

The other night or two of those half-dozen are scattered randomly and unpredictably throughout the year.

Such a night is tonight.

The children have been spending their Spring Break at my mother’s house in PA.  The wife is working down in Delaware all day, then visiting her friend in central NJ for dinner, and will probably be home by midnight or so.  That means me on his own for six hours.

What to do – what to do …

Well, I just finished a brutal half-week at work.  Thursday and Friday should be easier.  So I might celebrate that fact with a Foster’s oil can.

But I have to make dinner.  The wife thoughtfully stuffed a frozen pizza in the freezer for me, but I think I’d like to share that with her.  So I will fall back on Bachelor Default: cook some pasta and throw a can of soup in it.

Then the $64,000 Question: To read or watch a movie?

The $64,000 Answer: Both!

I’m nearing the end to Why the South Lost the Civil War, a more-scholarly-than-I-intended-to-read book on the meta-reasons why the Confederacy, er, lost.  A little more erudite and sociological for my amateur tastes in the conflict.  (Maybe 20 percent of the book deals with actual soldiers and battle; the remainder deals with Southern culture, guilt, religion, honor, and, of course, the institution of slavery.)  Less than a hundred pages of this five-hundred-pager left, so I want to get that under my belt before I start one of Bruce Catton’s works sitting patiently on deck.

I also DVR’d Predators, starring Adrian Brody’s voice, for tonight.  I reviewed that surprisingly neat flick here.  So I’ll watch some sci fi carnage while eating steak soup and pasta, then read for an hour or so before turning in early to bed.

Because … brace for it … I’ve been lifting the weights at the crack of dawn the past couple of weeks!  More on that, later.

Enjoy!