Here in the States another three day weekend is upon us, and our kids are GONE. Not permanently, mind you, just for the weekend. Our son is working long hours (that’s the restaurant biz, yo) and our daughter spent the better part of the week organizing a BFF weekend, most of which has taken place outside the walls of our home. All this to say, my husband and I are getting a small taste of what it might be like later, when we are true empty nesters.
And what is it like? Well, it’s quiet. The number of people asking me for stuff is reduced by two, and my husband only asks if it appears as though I’m getting up anyway. I’m cooking way too much food, but I’ve been doing that for awhile now, since many evenings one or more of our children is working. It’s hard to downshift from cooking for four–two of whom are big eaters–to cooking for two. I might never get used to it, and someday my husband and I will just eat the the same thing for days at a time for the rest of our lives. That only sounds sort of terrible.
Lest you think we’ve spent the whole weekend sitting on our keisters (it’s only been eighty percent of the weekend, thank you very much), we actually did get some things accomplished, and not just in the Minecraft world my husband and kids share (Aside: I don’t play, but my job is to occasionally glance up at the television and tell my husband to look out for things he cannot see). Here is a (short) list of things accomplished during this Labor Day weekend:
- We cleaned the pantry! Some years ago, we–and by we, I actually mean I–decided the pantry would always be cleaned some time during Labor Day weekend, and we’ve tackled this chore this weekend since. It doesn’t take very long–maybe a couple of hours–but it’s disheartening to throw all that food away, mostly amounting to snacks my kids begged for and then didn’t eat, snacks they loved until I bought them in bulk, when they immediately stopped eating them, and stale bags of chips with only crunched-up pieces left in the bottom.
- Shopping! Friday night is date/grocery shopping night (this is what passes for good times in your forties, y’all), but this week we went on the date and skipped the grocery shopping. To be fair, we could probably live off the food we uncovered in our pantry for a good while, but my kids and husband drink three to four gallons of milk a week, plus we are meat-eaters and there is no meat in our pantry. All of this necessitates a trip to the grocery store.
I also had to run to the drugstore, since my son has a nasty end-of-summer cold and has been taking cold pills like they’re candy. Of course because these are the times we are living in, when he called into work earlier this week they said he couldn’t come back without a negative COVID test (he separately drove all around town for the specific at-home test his employer would accept), even though he’s been vaccinated. I knew it was a cold; he knew it was a cold, but they required a test anyway, which was negative. He feels better, but that cold is hanging on, so off to the pharmacy for pills so he can breathe.
Oh, and I went to Michaels, because yarn. Have no fear, among the things this blog will not become is a craft blog for me to show off all my crochet projects, mostly because I only finish about two of them a year.
Finally, the stuff you come here for: - I finished (?) the outline for my NaNoWriMo story! I spent this week writing down absolutely every scene idea I had for this story, and compiled them in Scrivener this weekend, ending up with two solid chapters and about twenty floating scenes that I will organize (and turn into chapters) later. I only finished the outline insofar as I wrote down every idea I have, but I believe an outline is never really finished until the story is. But what I’ve got now–and whatever else I come up with in the next two months–is enough for me to hit the ground running on November 1.
- I wrote this blog post. I could have used the long weekend as an excuse to skip the post, and as I’ve said before, writers will use every and any tool at their disposal to not actually do any writing. But here I am, closing out a post where I spent way too much time prattling on about food and shopping, and precious little time on anything else. But I enjoyed writing it. I hope reading it made you happy, and if it didn’t, that you get time this weekend to do something that does.
Vickie Jarman 