At the end of the afternoon on Friday.

The dishes are soaking in hot sudsy water in the kitchen sink. I hope all the dirt soaks off so I'll hardly need to scrub them. I'm going to change the water in the sink before I wash them. It will be necessary, because it will be lukewarm by the time I get around to doing them. I do so enjoy doing the dishes if the food particles come off easily and I'm left with sparkling glasses and shiny silverware. Now, these are a week's worth of dishes, so hardly a cup or a glass is clean and I really have to do them now. I'm all for toss out cups and plates, but I think that nowadays I can't get away with that. It would be highly wasteful and ecologically unsound. But if I could get away with it, I would do it. I'm lazy enough for it.

After I got up this morning and got myself all dressed and dolled up and shiny new and ready to go, and it was just about time to get on my bike, I realized that I needed to sleep, so I undressed and crawled into bed and was asleep in no time at all and slept for three more hours. Then, when I got up, I felt good and had a cup of coffee and was ready to face the day. I was incapable of it the first time. My somberness got in the way of me, and when it does, I need to go to sleep. There's no other solution for it.

I'm so glad that I know this about myself and that I am in a position to do something about it immediately, because I have no other people depending on me. Imagine if I had children now that needed taking care of, what would I do? Or I had a job to go to? I would sit there in pure misery and have a little nervous breakdown and be unable to do my work properly. Of course, I have been in those situations in the past and have known plenty of misery when I was unable to figure out what was wrong and I was absolutely miserable and completely depressed or stressed out and unable to function. I always blamed it on my situation and not on something that was the matter with me. That was before I knew myself as well as I do now.

So anyway, I made a shopping list, because I knew the Exfactor was coming and I had a lot of groceries to get and knew he would do them for me so I would not have to take my life in my own hands by trying to bring them all home on my bicycle. No matter how long I live in this country, I will not become a natural bicyclist. I am, in my heart, a car driver. I feel insecure on my bike and always feel that if I don't have perfect control over it, something will go terribly wrong and I will have an accident. That's how I feel when my bike is loaded down with groceries, so I'm always very happy to let the Exfactor do them.

I've gotten to the point now, where I don't mind doing the actual shopping. As a matter of fact, that's kind of enjoyable, especially if I have the money to spend and I can buy something extra that is not on the list. That was not the case today, of course. Today was the day for frugal shopping and watching every penny. It comes down to nickels and dimes. I don't mind that, as long as there is enough to go around and we don't go hungry. But shopping itself is not a bad thing to do. It can be fun to walk around the store and look at all the things that you're not going to buy, or that you would have bought if you didn't have that darn gastric band. And you may have noticed that I'm completely over my appetite for French cheese. I don't long for it anymore at all.

So, the Exfactor did the groceries and I walked the dog and together we unloaded the groceries when he got back, while the dog serenaded us, because that's a tradition he thinks we can't do without. The Exfactor had a beer and I had a cup of coffee and we talked about cows and calves as we say here, meaning, we talked about nothing important and everything in general. Not all of our conversations can be deep and meaningful, after all. Sometimes he mentions his girlfriend and it causes just the tiniest pinprick of discomfort with me. Nothing serious, really. It is a reality that I can't get around and I'd rather that he just talks about her in a normal way than that he is silent about her. That would make me more uncomfortable, as if she were a deep dark secret.

Now I'm just sitting here writing this post, but in reality postponing doing those dishes. I'm very good at procrastinating. I work well under pressure and the apartment needs to be cleaned up by tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm, because that's when my friend J. is going to be here. So you would think I would be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but I am not. Everything will get done and there will be more than enough time.

Well, that's a short story, but that's all I have to report. I am not very long winded today. It wasn't a day of great adventure and I'm sure nothing very exciting is going to happen this evening. I'll tell you about it tomorrow if it does.

So, I wish you all the best of evenings and the best of days and I hope something good crosses your path.

Ciao,
Nora