Budgeting My Time

I am at the point where I can see my parents moving back home.  And while I finally made some -- OK, a little -- headway with my stuff, there are still large piles of ... stuff strewn all around the living room.  Combine that with all the things I need to, you know, maintain (keeping up with e-mails, eating all the food that's in the fridge, exercising), and I see that I'm overwhelmed with a bunch of chores I feel I have to do without feeling as though I have the time to do them.  And that's when I need self-care, a time when I can just cut loose and not give a damn about anything.  Then I need to budget that into my time as well.

With the Vikings season over, however, I believe things will start to settle down.  I can formulate in my head the beginning scaffolding of how many days I will devote to what.  What I feel it's going to look like is this:

• One or two days working out.
• Wednesdays not doing anything -- buying coffee before work, buying stuff after work, I'm just going straight home and eating leftovers -- because I want to watch The Amazing Race and ABC comedies as long as they're on.  It's a good time to wash clothes and dishes, go through the mail and, if I have all those things done, sort through my stuff.
• Weekends I will stay home, or close to it.  I can't exercise because it's so darn busy at the community center.  But especially now with the omicron variant ripping through the state, I don't think a good night out at a crowded bar or restaurant or movie theater seems like a smart idea.  While everybody else is partying, I think I'll hunker down and, well, listen and/or watch Minnesota Golden Gopher men's hockey while I do my chores.
• With that being said, I think I need to give myself at least one workday, Monday through Thursday, out.  Watch a movie, visit downtown and see the bars I frequent, eating out, what have you -- I need to give myself some freedom.  And I hope I won't catch the 'Rona as a result.

We'll see how this all shakes out.  Football still dominates my weekends.  For example, I expect to pig out on a lot of food that I'll both take out from the refrigerator and buy between Saturday and Monday.  I'll probably do it again the next weekend, both days.  After that, my weekends open up, and I'll ... well, hopefully I'll use it to do the things I find necessary to do.

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On a side note, I've been told I need to do some time in the lab tomorrow using a knife.  I'm not usually a fan of going in there, and I hate the job in the morning where I open up packages.  And if that weren't bad enough, there's a slight chance of freezing drizzle during my drive into work in the morning.  Great.  Something to look forward to.