A Different Day in Book Seven: Reconstruction 2020

Whoo. Boy howdy did yesterday go long!

Typically… my days would be 8:00 to 4:30. Yes, I’m a government employee. Yesterday? I got to work at 6:30 a.m. and didn’t leave court until 5:00 p.m. So… quite a long day for me, respectively. My plans for last night kind of flew out the door, though. First, I’m a shit.
I have to own up to my own shortcomings. I forgot to feed the dog yesterday morning.
She gets fed at 7 a.m. and since I left for work at 6 a.m., I hadn’t even considered it. Luckily Martha caught it and fed Nala before she left. Because yesterday was Martha’s first day back in class. So, I need to own that and take responsibility for my own Dog-related failure. That being said? Martha did not put Nala in her kennel. So… there are now 3 blankets and 2 sheets that have large holes chewed out of them. Worse? Nala found the DVD my parents gave me for Christmas. If this picture works… this is what Martha came home to after class:

So that’s a problem.

Martha wanted some stuff at the grocery store and I needed to buy replacement ingredients for a slow cooker recipe, so we went grocery shopping together. Then came home. I had originally intended to play video games, but wanted to stay upstairs and thought nothing of it. Martha chose an Anime to watch (Cells at Work… a great blend of Anime for me and Biology for her). I got up to feed the dog and use the restroom, and when I came back Martha had started a skillet meal for dinner. Which was nice, her taking an initiative to actually get a dinner going. But as the show continued, Martha focused more and more on her texting. I would repeatedly get up to check on the food; but as Martha started the dinner… one would hope that she would snap her head out of texting with boys to make sure her dinner didn’t burn. It almost did. As it was dinner for both of us, I kept checking it and saved it just before burn settled in. The sound of me turning off the stove top is what finally snapped her out of her Text Trance and she thanked me for checking on the food (clearly oblivious to the fact that I had been checking on the food). We ate. Then she asked me to crack her back; which I did. Then she started watching “Last of the Summer Wine.” I was feeling tired due to my day, so I turned in at around 9:30. Clearly (not surprising at all) I didn’t exactly fall asleep right away. But I skimmed more than usual. That’s the process of being awake but not awake… if you’ve ever “dozed” during a movie to discover that you were only out for about 10 minutes… then you catch another 20 minutes of the movie… then fall asleep for 15… then are awake for… that whole process. So I skimmed probably for an hour or two… then couldn’t sleep at all for an hour. Stupid confusing body sleepy signals. Fell asleep for real and true at around midnight.

So you can imagine when my alarm went off at 5 a.m. this morning, I thought “Bah! Fuck it!” and went back to sleep until 7. Woke up, fed the dog, got dressed. When I went to leave the house though… something VERY peculiar. The way our house is built… one of the doors that goes from the house to the garage is in our “mud room”… and the mudroom is essentially a room that can access either the kitchen or the basement. We also have a door in our garage that opens onto the gated back yard. As I went to leave through the mudroom, I noticed that the door to the garage was open. Strange, but not entirely bizarre. If you don’t shut it right, it can remain a bit open. But as I opened it to leave, I saw that the door in our garage to the back yard was open. Strange. There are a number of possibilities and a number of outcomes. THE MOST LOGICAL since we did get more snow last night… is that Martha did not throw the lock on the door accessing the yard. A strong enough blast of wind would then easily force that door open. Considering the angles involved, it would be extraordinarily easy for the continued application of strong winds (now accessing the garage through the open door) to force open the “mud room” door if it were not closed properly. THAT is the most logical. But of course, it is me… and more thoughts exist. LESS logical would be that a human being, with either malicious intent or the will to survive the snow, opened the doors and used our basement for shelter or to steal from us. LESS logical would be that Martha told one of her Tinder Boys the easiest way to get in at night to lay low for a rendezvous after I left for work, and the bloke didn’t bother to shut the doors behind him. Again… the wind explanation is far more likely… but this is what pops into my mind. Well, that and the subsequent concern that no matter how the doors got open; I worry that critters like squirrel or raccoon got into the house. Even more unfortunate? I did not have time to mount a proper search before I left. So I’m going to have that in my head all day. The worry about someone in my house or some animal roaming my home. Definitely going to make today uneasy and make it more difficult for me to just… focus and not worry about it. I’ll text Martha to make sure she’s safe and that nothing was stolen or eaten or pooped on… but as it is Martha, I don’t expect my text to receive a response more speedy than 4 hours later. So… I’ll just try not to think about it. LOL. HA!

Today… looks to be busy again. But in a spread out way. 2 hearings this morning (10 and 10:30) and that’s it for that. But 4 hearings this afternoon (1, 2, 3, and 3:30); so the afternoon could get sticky.

Last updated January 14, 2022