The Fates smile upon me. Well, in their twisted sort of way.
I get yet another week of responsibility and interruption-free time to myself. Just me and the dog and 3 cats in the house....well, 5 cats if you count Pippin as another 2. If you are a parent, you probably think a week alone sounds like some kind of kick ass gift of the Gods. While it is nice to have time to myself where I can lie on the couch, watch TV and get some actual, for-real, honest-to-goodness mental and physical rest, being alone after being a parent for close to 5 years is quite disconcerting. For the past 20 minutes, I have been desperately trying to talk anyone through Facebook, Skype, or Google Chat. Basically, its really weird to have the house, which is typically full of young daughters either keeping me awake in the wee hours of the morning or jumping onto my stomach, empty other than myself and Ripley the shaggy, skittish dog. This time around, Larisa took the kids a week early to the Wisconsin cabin for more family functions, so basically the same reason as before.
So the question is put forth...what to do with my time now? As always, there are a multitude of mini tasks that need to be done that are impossible to complete with kids around. I was thinking, again, about painting the house, but this time, it is not rain preventing me, it was heat, and as we all know, heat plus humidity makes me insane. So I was forced to keep my activites inside, which certainly has its own set of neglected issues.
First off was cleaning the house. I find I am more mentally at ease when lounging in a obstacle-free area. I also did tons of laundry. And cleaned the tub. That was no small task....months of grime build-up had to be scoured off. Elora's room needed a thorough tidying up as well. Pretty sad eh? I get all this time to myself and I spend it on the most boring activities known to man.
So of course I am not going to waste all of my free time on medioacre house chores. I invested some time into little projects that I have wanted to do for myself, such as organizing my healthy photo collection, photoshopping some of those pictures (removing red-eye or improving the color etc), getting my vast array of home improvement tools in order, painting a picture for my mother-in-law, learning how to cut glass for picture frames, and working on my geek collectibles, namely a figure of Morpheus from the Sandman comic books which had to be leveled in order to stand straight and making a picture frame from scratch for a very cool portrait. Add some good wine and play some new tunes on your modified Nintendo DS, and you basically have as much fun as I can have when alone. Its common for geeks such as myself to have a small collection of nerdy memorabilia. Ever seen 40-Year-Old Virgin? Remember how he has tons of figures still in the package? Same thing here, I am just not as gung-ho about it. As I have refined my sci-fi and fantasy interests over the past few years, I have
collected items which reflect those passions. To finish off this post, I shopped a picture with my shrine to geekdom and made a identifying list below:
1 - A figure of Gromit of Wallace and Gromit fame from the movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a brilliant movie I love watching with Ellie
2 - Morpheus of the Sandman comics, an epic graphic novel created by Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite writers and movie makers.
3 - The aforementioned portrait, of Hunter S. Thompson, one of my heros.
4 - A picture of Roxy and a flower bed in the shape of a mushroom I made in Hummelstown a long time ago with a friend, Bear.
5 - A small ceramic car I made ages ago in Scotland.
6 - Just to the right of the arrow is a little wooden statue of a woodpecker I got on my travels with my brother in Alburquerque NM.
7 - A small figure of Chewbacca holding C-3PO in pieces on his back.
8 - I call this guy Leet Monkey, my first computer case resident. He was mistakenly stolen by Ellie when she was only 2 from a bookstore. He kept her busy while I waited in a huge line.
9 - Lego and Star Wars, 2 of my favorite things. In this case, its Darth Vader and his TIE fighter.
10 - One of my favorite pics of me and 3 of my friends (Mike, Rob, and Ace) around a campfire somewhere on the AT