We're testing the freshmen this week, so every day's schedule is slightly different from the norm, which only made the day oddly paced, but still busy. I don't think I had a minute of down time, even though the upperclassmen didn't get to school until 10:00; lunch was late and cut short by 15 minutes, and then it was my early day, so the end seemed to come up very fast after lunch. I still haven't shelved my fiction, but it's all ready to go tomorrow morning, and I'm oddly looking forward to that. I've come across about a dozen books in the new shipment, all YA fiction, that I want to cull out for myself before I put them out.I kept on doing stuff when I got home, too, so I have a better sense of order here, a little, anyway. I went out and got scallops for dinner, which came out okay. I'm amused that I feel somewhat obligated to provide a decent dinner for R when she gets home from work, especially in light of the fact that I generally felt no such compulsion when she and her sister were growing up in this house and still had to eat every day, at some point anyway, after school. But we discussed this the other day; I rarely cooked (as in "a home-cooked meal") because it was almost impossible to get them both to eat the same thing at any given time. If I did make dinner and one of them turned it down, my response was always "Well, fine, more for me" and I did not cook an alternate meal. Ultimately, I made a lot of food that went uneaten, and that bothered me. It became way more reasonable to go to MacDonald's and let them each pick something, or let one have spaghettios and the other ... well, whatever. One of them ate eggs, the other one wouldn't. One of them would not eat ... are you ready ... pizza. Oh, she would eat it from time to time, if she was out with her friends or some such thing, but never EVER went along with "How about pizza for dinner?" I said to her once -- this is R, when she was maybe 14 -- "Once, just once, when I say 'How about pizza?' could you just say 'Gee, mom, pizza sounds swell!'" Ever since then, she says it, but she doesn't mean it.
Anyway, now that she's a big person and the cooking is only for the two of us, K being away and the Hubs being a) a vegan and b) a better cook than all of us and his own chef, it's much easier. I know what she won't eat -- very few things, actually -- and anything else I want to make is okay. I'm enjoying it, too. Who knew.
So she's off doing the pub trivia, since they haven't got a replacement for her yet, and the Hubs is teaching, and I'm ready to go to sleep. And now I'm going to have not just "happen" to fall asleep on couch, but decide: deliberately fall asleep on the couch or go to bed? Time to realize that I'm just not quite steady when it comes to going to bed and closing the door when there's no one else in the house. How weird is that? It's being in the room with the door closed that creeps me out, not so much the being alone. I think it's because I have that fear that if anything happens -- really, what would happen -- that I won't hear it. I have to close the door, or Q the cat will get into the bedroom and spend the night jumping on and off my head. If she would jump on the bed and nestle by my feet, like a normal cat, we'd just leave the door open, but no. And now I'm convincing myself: couch for me, TV on. I sleep better that way anyway, first hour or two on the couch and then I wake up and go to bed and sleep the rest of the night. (Or till 4:30 or so, which is as close to a good night's sleep as I'm going to get.) The Hubs should be home by 11:00 or so, which is in an hour. I'm such a wuss.
