What I did this weekend, a Report by Melodee

On Friday night, my twin teenagers slept over at someone’s house.  They didn’t return home until Saturday night. I cleaned their room while they were gone, but not until Saturday morning.  (Hint:  DISGUSTING.)

Saturday morning, my husband took our two youngest to an indoor play area.  It was a two-for-one deal, hooray.  While they were gone, I intended to clean for an hour, then head off  to the library to write.  However, one thing led to another and I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned for what felt like a million years, but was only three hours.

By 2:00 p.m. I was in my regular spot at the library, writing my faux novel.  I decided by 5 p.m. that I am delusional and what was I thinking?  Also, why am I doing this again?  I struggled to put 800 words on paper, bringing my grand total pretty close to 18,000 words, which is nearly a quarter of the way to completion.  I haven’t looked at it since, but I will resume work this week, plowing toward the finish line.  The whole point of this exercise is to do it.  To write a novel.  To finish a novel.  Whatever happens after that is not my immediate concern.  I really need a girlfriend to sit down with to discuss the behavior of the people in my novel.  I think I need to talk it out.

Saturday night I did absolutely nothing, other than cringe while watching UFC (fighting) with my husband while reading a magazine.

Sunday we went to church, then to Dick’s Drive-In afterward.  When we got home, I took the two younger kids to the pool (which opened the day before) and they jumped right in and passed the swim test.  Grace spent much of her two hours jumping off the diving board and chatting with the lifeguards.  One even let her sit in the tall lifeguard chair during adult swim and then let her blow the whistle when it was Kid Swim again.

When we returned home I cleaned off the kitchen counter.  I found a basket full of Christmas cards.  I saved some and threw the rest away.  I sorted through a stack of papers and threw away coupons that expired in March.  I cleaned out two purses.  All this took an hour and is proof that I ought to be fired from household management.

And then it was time to go to a movie with my husband.  We saw “Star Trek” which was quite entertaining.  I liked it quite a lot.  It was made all the more entertaining by the three soldiers sitting in front of us who got such a kick out of it.

This morning, then, I roused everyone and had us all en route to Wild Waves by 9:30 a.m.  We have season’s passes.  The idea is to arrive as the park opens to claim a spot for the day.  That’s exactly what we did.  We had our four kids plus two extras.   Although I sprayed us all with SPF 50 sunscreen, we are all a little pink from our five hours of fun in the sun.  (My fun involved sitting on the lounge chair reading an Elizabeth Berg novel and despairing over my own novel.)

Back home by 4:00 p.m. and then my husband took four kids (three ours, one friend) to the “Night of the Museum” movie.  In their absence, I cleaned out our big freezer.  Unfortunately I had to discard two turkeys of unknown age.  I hate it when I waste food.  Really.  Hate.  But what can you do?  We bought an eighth of a cow (organic, natural beef) and it’s going in that freezer next weekend. It will keep all my husband’s leftover Jenny Craig food company.

I also vacuumed and cleaned random spots off the carpet.  Although I could not remove the GUM?  GUM?  Who drops chewed gum in the living room and doesn’t pick it up?  Or report it to the proper authorities?  Seriously.

While defrosting the freezer (it’s really bad–it’s still thawing), I went outside and sprayed Round-Up on the stray weeds.  And I noticed how badly our back ivy-covered fence is leaning and wondered how much those neighbors back there hate us and remembered how mad I was when the contractor pulled that fence out of its socket and what a poor job he did fixing it–he just shoved it back up, instead of making sure the end fit into the socket–and I wondered how in the world we are ever going to get that fence down so it can be replaced because the ivy is as thick as small tree trunks and is woven right through the chain link fence.  It’s a mess.

Also?  My boys like to use sticks to shatter plastic things into bits and if they don’t stop it I’m sending them all off to an orphanage.

Also, whoever keeps breaking popsicle sticks and tossing them around the house is on my Knock It Off List.  KNOCK IT OFF.

And now, back to the freezer.

And back to real life tomorrow.

Hope you all had lovely weekends.