Re: Part 1 of 2: "A day in the ER life"
Motto-- "Every day is Saturday, every night is Friday night."
Here's the schedule:
Up around 4:30 AM (all those *%@!#$ morning watches on sea duty). Pad quietly around the house for breakfast & coffee while booting the computer. Spend the next couple hours reading e-mail, on-line newspapers & discussion boards, and checking the stock market. Play maybe just one or two hands of Solitaire. Enjoy an amazing sunrise.
6:30-7:20 Hang out while the kid gets ready for school. Check on homework & laundry. Try to plan the week's calendar of kid social/sports activities during that quality "parental contact time".
7:30 See if the spouse is up yet (hah!). File the papers that seem to be spawning & mutating on top of my desk. Take a few Motrin ("Vitamin M") and practice tae kwon do poomse.
8:00 or 8:30 Join my spouse for breakfast, play a couple rounds of "I dunno, waddya YOU wanna do today?"
8:30-9:? Morning walk. Say hello to the regular walkers. Hopefully rush hour is over and things are a little quieter on the street, otherwise wave at all the commuters evacuating the neighborhood.
9:ish Honey-dos. Outdoors if it's cool & cloudy, indoors if not. Weed-whacking, pruning, composting, transplanting, and swearing that the yard will have a coherent landscaping plan-- next year for sure. Try to dust every room in the house at least monthly. Try to remember the last time we laundered towels & sheets. If we're feeling ambitious then tackle an hour or two of the latest project-- repainting, renovating a bathroom, repairing furniture, insulating the attic, tweaking the sprinklers, planting a drought-tolerant border, whatever's on the (increasingly longer) home-improvement list.
11:ish Lunch. Maybe go out for Thai or Mexican. Otherwise just graze around the kitchen.
Noon. Pester my spouse about an afternoon "nap". If that's not in the cards, then take a real nap for 30 minutes. (Amazingly refreshing-- wish I'd been able to do this when I was working, but any longer and I'll be up all night.)
Afternoon. Errands (Home Depot, library, Lowe's, Wal-Mart, maybe Home Depot again). Go surfing if there aren't any errands. Regardless of the mission, this part of the day seems to take two-three hours door-to-door.
3:30 PM "Hurricane Kid" returns home from school. Check on homework & laundry. Try to coordinate the calendar of social/sports activities. Catch up on the latest outrageous breaking news of the middle-school scene while watching 800 calories vaporize as if by magic.
4:00 Get the kid started on homework. Deal with the mail. Check e-mail or make phone calls. Fire up the hobby-stock screener and see what's moving, think about buy limits & sell stops. Or maybe sit in the recliner and work on my reading list while spouse catches up on the TV we've been recording.
4:30 Get dinner going. (Hey, you're retired, now you don't have an excuse not to prepare most of the meals!) Fantasize about CostCo pizza EVERY night, not just Fridays.
5:00 Dine en famille a la Norman Rockwell, make usual threats about "No tae kwan do until after homework!", attempt to engage in light-hearted conversation with spouse after ensuing histrionics subside. (One day this kid will internalize the difference between "time management" and "too many activities". Lord knows we haven't been able to teach the theory of it.)
5:40 Depart for tae kwon do after homework amazingly completes itself.
6:00 Hang out with the other parents, watch my kid develop the fastest left-leg round kick on the island.
7:00 Spouse arrives to give the kid a ride home, I stay for the "Over-30" tae kwon do class. Pass around vitamin M, compare bruises & pulled muscles. Try to accelerate the slowest kicks on the island without actually spraining or dislocating anything.
8:15 Shower, more vitamin M. Limp downstairs to "help" with bedtime preps.
8:30 Kid's asleep. Update the books & files for the kid's sports association and swear that I'll only be Treasurer for one more year. Vouch to research all the crap piling up in the study closet and list it on eBay.
9:00 More reading in the recliner or in bed. Try to figure out how we ever found time for work. Check on spouse's re-assessment of earlier conjugal proposals. Swear that tonight I'll sleep past a sunrise.