Category Archives: A Day In The Life

How We Spend Our Days

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I finally did it! Lest you think that the “it” in question is something interesting and exciting, let me hasten to tell you what “it” is. For the first time ever, I completed an entire week of time-tracking, of writing down the exact way that I spend my days.

I have tried to time track before, and failed on the first day. Truthfully, I have failed in the first few hours of the first day of tracking; for one, it is so boring. It’s boring and tedious to write down the number of minutes spent doing any given thing. For another thing, when I last tried this the boys were in junior high and I was teaching a LOT of yoga classes, and the sheer number of drudgery-and-food-related things that I recorded within the first few hours of the day was incredibly depressing. This is how I am spending my one wild and precious life? I thought, before abandoning the project.

But I was curious, for reasons I’ll get to later, and so I set myself up for success by creating a two-page-a-day chart that would record start and end times, and I cut down on the daily tedium by filling out in advance the first seven things that I do every single day without fail, thinking, correctly, that once the morning routine was recorded, the rest would be easier.

The results were not unexpected. A big swath of my week is devoted to yoga, exercise, and dog walking, and another to gardening. Writing takes up a good deal of it, as well as food preparation and household tasks, which feel less drudge and onerous these days, personal care, reading, and spending time with my husband, kids, and friends. Remember that old story about putting the big rocks in the jar first, and then allowing the little rocks to take up the spaces in between? At this point in my life, everything feels like Big Rocks, and, simultaneously, nothing does.

My days are pleasantly full, and while none of my daily activities feels optional, they all technically are. Even personal care, food preparation, and household tasks: strictly speaking I COULD really let things go in the hygiene and beauty department, I COULD allow the house to become a cesspool of filth or, more realistically, hire that out, and I COULD DoorDash all our meals or rely solely on frozen pizza and toast. I could! I won’t, but I could.

What I’m saying is that everything that occurs in my day feels Very Important to me. I am not a person who scrolls much, but I do like to check my Facebook and Instagram once or twice a day, and in no way does this feel like a waste of time. I love to check if it’s someone’s birthday, or if someone is on vacation or bought a new house or outfit, I love to see if someone’s kids are doing something interesting or if their pet is sleeping in a cute way. I want to see someone’s shoes or what they made for dinner. I am here for even the most mundane of updates: you want to talk about the new Zumba class you’re going to, or the shitty day you had at work, or the weird sign that was at the community centre? I AM HERE FOR YOU.

The upshot to all of this is that I am very nosy, and I cannot get enough details of other people’s lives.

It is this nosiness that brings me to the whole reason I did this time tracking experiment in the first place, and that is the blogging community. I always think about blogging as a hobby, but then my friend Pearl (HI PEARL) wrote about creating as a way of life, and blogging is part of that. It can take up as much or as little time as a person might want. It is important to me to put out a weekly post that is interesting, entertaining, and, most of all, polished, and so it takes hours to go from Idea to Published. It is also important that I respond to any and all comments; if a person takes the time to comment, I want to take the time to respond. I have time for people who have time for me.

This is a nice segue into the other side of blogging, which is community building. If a person reads and comments on my blog, I am going to read and comment on theirs; it’s common courtesy in my mind, not exactly a Quid Pro Quo, but more like a Keeping Up With My Correspondence. Plus, as I said before, I’m nosy. I want to know what’s going on in your life!

All takes time, of course, and that is a finite resource. I budget between 30-45 minutes a day for blog reading and commenting, and it was this time budget that was the reason I did the time tracking experiment in the first place. I wanted to see if I was, indeed, keeping within the budget. I did, clocking in at an average of 40 minutes per day. Most of this happens first thing in the morning while I’m drinking my coffee; if you’ve ever had an unhinged or incomprehensible comment from me, that’s why. It’s early! The coffee hasn’t kicked in yet!

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and I’m happy with how I fill my time. I wasn’t sure, moving here, how things would go. I wasn’t sure how my husband would handle retirement, I wasn’t sure how I would handle not having kids to take care of or yoga classes to teach, but, as we all know, worry is a waste of time. Everything worked itself out: my days are full and fulfilling, and I didn’t need a time tracker to tell me that.

Weekly Reading

Shopgirls. A beach read – but make it in a department store in the 1980s. This was a very quick and light read about a young woman who, despite her youth and her Salvation Army outfits, is the top salesgirl in I Magnin, a fancy San Francisco department store. It was cute and diverting, a nice easy read for a sunny weekend. Thanks to Bijoux (HI BIJOUX) for the recommendation!

Fun For The Whole Family. Dysfunctional families, childhood trauma, family secrets, complicated sibling relationships, estrangement – but make it light and fun! A lot of heavy topics in this very engaging and diverting read about four estranged siblings coming together in the middle of a North Dakota winter for the first time in years, but the book is not heavy at all. It’s sweet and lovely, a heartwarming pick-me-up, and another great summer read.

I have an important garden update! My perennial garden is in full bloom, including the butterfly bush.

The flowers are frequented by bees and butterflies, and I finally caught on camera the enormous yellow butterfly that has been zipping around lately.

It made me so happy, and reminded me of my friend Suz (HI SUZ), who is everyone’s favourite expert in butterfly husbandry. She had recently talked about HER butterfly bush, and I am heartened to think of us on opposite corners of the continent, enjoying the same things. This community – together but apart – is the one of the best things about blogging, and one I do not take for granted. Thank you, everyone, for being here and being a part of my life. xo

A Day In The Life: Saturday, What A Day, Grooving All Week With You

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Everybody’s doing it, so I will too! Day in the Life posts are abounding in my lovely blog community, and I realized that a) it’s been a while for me, and b) I’ve never done a WEEKEND Day in the Life, and so here we are. Even though I have no job, no kids who are in the school system, and a retired husband, I do like to make a distinction about weekend activities. I could probably make every day the same, but I thrive on a schedule and routine, and I like to have a different one for weekends.

Saturday May 3

3:55 am. I wake up at my normal time, but then I remember it’s Saturday! So I doze off and on for a couple of hours before getting up just after 6:00 am. Every single day, I do the same thing when I get up: I go downstairs, start the coffee, and drink two big glasses of water. After that I let Rex out of his crate and after he’s joyfully greeted me like it’s been years instead of hours since we’ve seen each other, I let him outside. While he’s there I fill his bowls and do my morning ablutions – wash face, brush hair and teeth, apply SPF moisturizer – and then go check on him. He’s still out and about, probably sniffing the resident coyote or deer scents. When we moved here I fretted so much about having no fences, but it turns out dogs really can be trained to stay within their range, and he does. He’s out there for a while this morning, so I pull out my laptop, pour a big cup of coffee, and start answering blog comments.

I’ve been taking branched-chain amino acids in the morning lately; it’s supposed to help with perimenopause-related fatigue, and I think it does. I mean, I’m very much a Placebo Effect person, so who really knows. I let Rex in after about twenty minutes, and he flops at my feet while I edit my Monday post and read a few blogs, as well as my daily Simple Abundance reading and a Mary Oliver poem.

7:25 am. Time for walkies, but before that I give the downstairs bathroom a quick cleaning. I get dressed, brush my coffee teeth, put on a little mascara and tinted lip balm, and head out with my favourite fuzzy companion. We walk by the creek, which is super high, so we take the high path instead of the more-fun, but now flooded, low one. We meet and greet a lot of the regulars, including but not limited to the man with the chocolate lab who always has a ball in his mouth, an older fellow wearing a “Canada Is Not For Sale” hat – elbows up, sir! – a couple with a fifteen-pound version of Rex, and a gentleman who refers to himself as “Grandpa” and who, every single time I see him, tells me the same joke regarding a quote from Winston Churchill and the inscrutability of women. He always says Stop me if I’ve told you this before but at this point, I’m never stopping him.

9:05 am. I arrive home to a bustling kitchen, where my husband and son are making breakfast. I make my own breakfast – a green smoothie – chug some more water and coffee, and notice how gross the floors are, even though they’ve been vacuumed and washed twice this week already. I do it a third time, wash the blender and accoutrements, call the vet to order Rex’s preventative lice/ flea/ tick/ heartworm medication, brush my now-green teeth, and head downstairs.

9:45 am. After a week of more-strenuous workouts, on Saturday mornings I like a Peloton recovery ride, so I choose a 20 minute one. Following that I give myself the gift of a restorative yoga practice with a silent meditation, and Rex tries to hold my hand while I have my legs up the wall.

10:30 am. I feel great! I drink some more water, and then Rex and I head to the garden. It’s supposed to rain this afternoon so I’m taking advantage of the sunshine to check things out. I get super excited to see that my spinach is close to harvesting already, weed a little, and then head back to the house as the clouds gather.

10:55 am. I make our bed, clean the ensuite, and change out the towels, after which I take a shower. Makeup on, hair done, and dressed, I put an absolutely enormous load of laundry in the washer, write out a few birthday cards, and read a document my husband asked me to review.

12:15 pm. I drive to the library to exchange some books and then to the vet to pick up the medication plus Rex’s expensive dental chews. I mail the cards, go to the bank, and then grudgingly to the grocery store to get eggs. I have long considered the egg industry to be terribly cruel, and to assuage those feelings and compromise with my egg-loving guys, we get a biweekly egg delivery from a local urban farm; I can see the hens on one of our walk routes, and they look happy and healthy. We get two dozen every two weeks, but I did not account for our older son being here for a transitional week between his dorm closing and moving into his new apartment. I spend some time talking to the employee about which eggs are most humane, buy ANOTHER two dozen, and hope fervently that the humane eggs really are.

1:15 pm. I’m home, and I’m hungry. My general view of leftovers is simply NO. I will not. The exception to this is Greek salad; I have lately been making a ridiculously large salad on Friday so I can have the leftovers on Saturday; I round it out with a protein smoothie, supplements, and lots of water. After that I brush my teeth and start food prep: two dressings for the next day’s dinner, and pasta sauce for tonight. Fun fact: I wrote about using my grandma’s trick of adding baking soda in order to cut the acidity of tomato sauce when I worked for YMC; this was in 2015 and so, predictably, my editor titled it Tomato Sauce: You’re Doing It Wrong. Wow, did I get blowback from that. Good times on the internet. As I reminisce about the days when you could expect an attack on your character for adding baking soda to tomato sauce, I wash all the dishes and wipe down the countertops.

2:30 pm. I practice my DuoLingo – I’m learning French and Arabic along with my Spanish – and then fold the giant load of laundry while talking to my mother on the phone. I brush Rex’s teeth and let him outside with a chew, I bake a pumpkin loaf and chop up cauliflower while drinking wine. I wash the associated dishes again, because I am spending my wild and precious life doing so, and also because I cannot abide a messy kitchen.

4:00 pm. I pour another glass of wine and settle in to read for a while, occasionally ambling to the kitchen to cycle pans of cauliflower into the oven and heat up water for pasta.

6:00 pm. Dinner time! We eat the roasted cauliflower with the internet-maligned pasta and sauce (it’s delicious), and the guys clean up the kitchen while I take Rex outside. I go upstairs to change into my pajamas, I brush and floss, wash my face, and apply my night creams along with my hand and feet moisturizers.

7:15 pm. Thus sexily attired and lubed up, I come downstairs to snuggle with my husband on the couch. We watch a movie – The Hit Man – but it’s so boring that I fall asleep for half an hour, and then when I wake up I’m incredibly confused. I watch the end, not knowing what’s going on, and then I go to bed.

9:10 pm. Good night!

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my Saturday! I’d love to hear about yours. xo