I did it again.
I rearranged the house (ok - just the living room). It's a compulsive obsession of mine to switch things around here. The tricky thing is that our home is tiny and so there aren't many combinations on how to switch the furniture around, especially since this tiny home of ours also has a funky layout. But nonetheless, if anyone can figure something out it'll be me.
How long will the new layout last?
Sometimes years. Sometimes months. Sometimes just days. Yeah. That last one drives Yangkyu a bit nuts. But he's not here right now and so I have a few more days until I get to decide whether to put everything back where they once were, or figure out a new layout. Ha! (Good news for Yangkyu: I have an inking this new layout will at least last us until the end the season).
I have been soloing it with Momo and Noah and our guest dog Lanna for the past week and a half. Yangkyu is currently in Korea teaching a 2-week workshop on tech. We had some disagreements on whether he should take this gig. First it was 2-weeks of his personal time that he would need to take to go and it would mean that Noah wouldn't be getting his sub-q fluids. He gets them twice a week to help filter out toxins out of his blood since his kidneys are compromised. In the end though Yangkyu really wanted this experience and so the dogs and I sent him off with a promise that he would bring back lots of tasty Korean treats for both human and dog. (Funny thing - the other night Yangkyu sent a text of 10 photos from inside a convenience store. He went to each aisle taking photos of chips and ramen and other goodies to see if there was anything in particular I wanted to try. Among the piles of ramen I noticed one that said tomato ramen. Tomato ramen?!)
Yangkyu flies back on Saturday but starting tomorrow things get busy around here. We'll have three more guest dogs coming by on Thursday. Then two more on Friday. And one on Saturday. Which means by Saturday I'll have 9 dogs roaming about, ruling the house from every nook and cranny. Yes. It should be fun. Hard. But fun.
Since I'm not the best driver in the world, we did massive grocery shopping before Yangkyu left. I think I was in armageddon mode as I kept buying things I normally don't eat afraid that somehow I will end up craving it once Yangkyu left. I ended up buying things like Cocoa Puffs. I'm 40 and I bought myself a box of Cocoa Puffs like I was back in elementary school. And Brisk Iced Tea. I don't think I had that since I was in high school. We bought an entire case at Costco. Almost the entire box is still sitting in our kitchen cabinet. The box of Cocoa Puffs is sitting on top of our refrigerator unopened.
During the down time I had this past week and a half with just one guest dog, I've been doing a lot of reading. I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and currently thoroughly enjoying Ruth Reichl's Save Me the Plums (I love her writing). I subscribed to the New York Times again (haven't had a newspaper delivery in 10 years - I used to live and breath media as my past job) and spend about an hour and a half reading through articles, editorials and columns and take a shot at the crossword puzzle too (I really suck at crossword puzzles).
I somehow have gotten through all 5 seasons of Ma'dam Secretary on Netflix. I didn't really sit and watch each episode. I had it on in the background and caught parts of episodes here and there. Yangkyu and I are huge fans of Tea Leoni in the movie The Family Man and so when she returned to TV I was quite excited.
I resubscribed to SlingTV so that I can watch soccer properly this time.
So I guess with Yangkyu gone, I've been mostly reading and spending a lot of money. Aside from the new subscriptions, I bought that ginormous orthopedic dog bed for Noah and Momo. Oh and a toaster. And a few other things..... many other things... herbal supplements, yoga mats, grass seeds, dog treats they don't need but thought they needed at the time when I hit the "confirm" button, food scale, eye drops. I mean... so random and some (many) unnecessary. (I literally just had to go to our expense tracking data sheet to remember some of the things I bought because I couldn't remember. If you can't remember things you buy then it is most definitely wasteful and unnecessary).
We have a monthly budget that we try to stick to every month and I can say that I surpassed it spectacularly this month. We have this budget so that we can save but also to not buy things we don't need (part of the reason we got rid of Amazon Prime was because we kept buying things we didn't need because the delivery was so fast).
It's so tempting to buy things. But one day I started to see it this way. When I'm 70, whether I bought myself that pretty dress dress or expensive make up or the fancy pot isn't going to determine whether I lived a fulfilling life. I won't look back and say, damn it! My life has been all for nothing because I didn't buy that thing when I was 40. It's been a good way of looking at how we interact with material things. But somehow this month this guiding principle has just all but gone down the drain (now I'm afraid when I'm 70 I'll be remembering the huge box of Brisk Lemon Iced Tea and the unopened box of Cocoa Puffs).
Some videos if you're interested -
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