Today is Sunday the 2nd of November. Hello!
According to what I said yesterday, today should be our day to get a lot of stuff done. As it turns out, however, my predictions are not often true. Justin’s not feeling well today. He woke up with a headache and he’s very tired and just not feeling his best. So his day is going to involve a whole lot of sitting still and not doing much.
Thankfully, yesterday we did manage to accomplish quite a lot for it being a low-key day. The house is clean. The laundry is all done (except for the bedding which we’re doing today). He mowed the lawn and took care of boxes in the living room. I cleaned out the drawers of my desk. I felt really good about everything we accomplished.
Today, we stayed home from church. We’re still looking for a church where we feel comfortable, and it’s hard facing that every weekend, sometimes. And with Justin not feeling well, we decided to just let him rest. I could have gone alone, but I really prefer not to do that. About an hour ago, I made muffins for brunch and he took care of putting the South Carolina plates on my car and taking our smelly pumpkins out to the trashcan.
And about 5 minutes ago I remembered that last night was Daylight Savings and that instead of it being 1:30 like I thought it was, it’s only 12:30. I just gained a whole hour to my day!
Anyway, what I was getting at is that now that he’s helped me cross those two things off my list for this weekend, I’m fine with him sitting still and trying to feel better. I plan to take care of my ironing, fix a hole in a pair of my work pants, and make sure that the laundry keeps on moving. It’ll be another quiet day, but that’s perfectly fine.
Friday afternoon, a man from the company who takes care of our air conditioning/heating unit came back to fix a problem we’ve been having. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but basically, our condenser coil was “condemned” by the guy who came out to check on it the first time when we called to say that the a/c wasn’t blowing at all. I won’t go into the details that happened between us and our landlady, but the result was that they were going to come out and replace the coil two Fridays ago. Of course, it poured down rain that day so they canceled and rescheduled to a couple of day ago. Halloween was a gorgeously sunny day, so I made sure to be here so the guy could get in to fix whatever he needed to fix.
He was a friendly guy. I could tell that he knew his stuff and when he told me he was the senior tech, I believed him. I have no complaints at all about his ability to do his job. But great pumpkins, that man could talk! And he’s typical of servicemen—unreserved, unashamed, and lovin’ it. He figured out not long after arriving that I’m a quiet, conservative girl (around people I don’t know) and that I blush without much provocation. And he worked that angle as hard as he could most of the time he was here. He was tossing out so much innuendo I wasn’t sure where to stand. He wasn’t doing it in earnest to actually get me into bed, but just enjoying that it made me blush and get all flustered. And he’d stop and apologize now and then and explain that he was “just messin’.” So for the most part, it didn’t bother me too terribly. Men all over do this to me once they realize they can make me embarrassed. But it does get really tiring and it’s a dangerous thing to just accept it.
Justin was online at work while the repairman was here. I dropped him a line to let him know what was happening and it made him very concerned. My gallant knight. I reassured him that things were okay and that I’d be sure to be careful. I had a discussion with the a/c man that basically said that I would call his manager if he said anything inappropriate or made me feel uncomfortable. And, since the job he was working on required him to wait for 30 minutes to make sure everything was working correctly, I sat in my office sorting receipts and he stood in the hallway outside my office chatting. He maintained that distance the rest of the time he was in the house, with two exceptions. One was to pick up a receipt that had fallen on the floor behind me. And the other was to have me sign the paperwork. For the first one, he made it clear what he was doing before he did it. And the second time, he said “I’m working now” as he stopped in, as if he needed to explain why he was approaching me with a clipboard and a pen.
The whole thing was exhausting. I didn’t notice how tiring it was until about 30 minutes after he’d left and I was finally coming down from the edge I’d been on for the whole time he’d been in the house. I was totally wiped out. And more jittery than I had expected. Not that I expected him to come back and do something untoward, but that he or someone like him would show up at our door that evening for Trick-or-Treating.
We spend the last couple of dollars we had for the month on candy for Trick-or-Treats. Justin’s family grew up celebrating this holiday much differently than mine did. Which is why I’ve only carved pumpkins a small handful of times and I can count on one hand the number of kids who have ever showed up at my front door asking for candy. The first couple of times people knocked on our door on Friday, I hung way back to see what exactly happened when Justin opened the door. And what happened, almost every single time, was that he’d open the door to find a couple of small kids dressed up like superheroes and fairies, who would sometimes get their line right, depending on their age, and then Justin would hand them a few pieces of candy, while the parents of the kids stood at the end of the driveway. They’d all say thank you, even the adults, and Justin would wish them a happy Halloween, and the kids would run over to our neighbors to see if they were home (and I’m pretty sure they weren’t). Not once did anyone over the age of 13 show up at our door begging for handouts (unless you count the ones walking kids who were too small to knock on the door by themselves).
It was fun! We had a lot more kids at our door than I had expected. I think they started showing up a little after 6:00 and we turned off our lights at around 8:30 because we were out of sweets. A lot of the kids were really sweet and cute-looking. They were all excited and happy. And they were all polite. Even the little ones who stuck their own hands into the bowl of candy in their excitement—they did remember to say thank you.
I’m glad we did it. It made for a very fun evening filled with loads of absolutely adorable children. We made omelets and watched a movie and went to bed, leaving the mess for the morning.
Tomorrow I have new-hire orientation, which will involve lots of movie watching, from what I understand. I’m not anticipating a very exciting day. But it’s going to be a day where I won’t be at my computer until I get home at night. So unless I get motivated to write something later this afternoon (and NOW it’s 1:30—there was my whole hour), don’t expect an update until later in the evening. I’m really not at all sure how tomorrow is going to work. But I’m excited to find out. I’ll tell you all about it sometime soon!