December, Day 3. The students are gone.
The cooks leave tomorrow night.
That leaves Lainey and me. We chat about once a day around 22:30. Okay so maybe I wait up for her a little bit...
But everything is going to be OK! I have a plan (ha! I don't feel like finding the link to it, but that does remind me of John Kerry's presidential campaign. Never did find out what his "very good plan" was.) My plan is called, "Loneliness and Solitude are Two Things Not to Get Confused."
Mostly it involves a self-structured schedule, crafts, projects, cleaning, homework, writing, and old people. And Puzzles. lots and lots of puzzling.
This is my first day of self-scheduling. So far, it's going rather well. I got up an hour after I intended (which I had also accounted for in my schedule. Know thyself...), made tea, got dressed and ready for the day, then headed off to research. However, David (house fix-it extraordinaire) asked me to Christmas the house. We brought in all the boxes of Christmas supplies, and I set about organising.
The result is a disastrous foyer (yay! saving that cleaning project for a rainy day!), a garlanded bannister, some random wee trinkets here and there, and three trees in silver, red, and gold. They're nothing like my ma's Christmas tree whisperer skills could have produced, but they are cheery and I like them.
This is good.
My survival plot just experienced a minor setback in that I've just gotten word that my friend Adam (visiting the UK) is no longer coming to Belfast, so there's that. But...no. yeah. There's that. ha.
Challenges. But challenges are also opportunities. And this could be my opportunity to finally, you know, do something like memorise the encyclopaedia or something.
It's amusing, really, this obscene amount of free and alone time, especially in comparison to my senior year of college. I was literally scheduled every single day from 9 am (ain't nobody talk to me before 9 unless you've got coffee in your hands for me) until 10:30 pm. To get in my planner, you had to ask for a slot a week ahead of time.
This did mean that I missed out on a lot of the random "being there" stuff, eating food other than nachos, pb &j, and cucumbers, and spending time with the people I actually wanted to spend time with in a time slot other than "post 10:30", but I liked it. If I could go back, I'd probably end up doing it really similarly.
Except that last part. I fell asleep during many a night hangout. That doesn't make people feel very valued. ha. It was good for me, that very structured business. I wonder if my friends would have chosen my living ways differently, though. Was it as good for them as it was for me? Or did they feel that I didn't care for them because I just wasn't around or made them into a task of the day?
What were my priorities? What were my motivations? Are they the same now as they were then?
Guess I've got a lot of uninterrupted time to think about it.
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