Day Sixty-two: Officially out of the rat race

I'm now taking it as as a sign. When I picked up the dead rat, a fairly small one, and put its stinking carcass in my trash can I wasn't. It was just another chore that was added to the list I made in my head as I was driving home. I was just glad that it was trash night. And trash night was the reason I had to come home before Labor Day. It would have been nice to drop in on my Pasadena daughter and her husband on my way home rather than breezing by their house. But, I had missed the two previous trash nights and needed to clear out some green bin stuff or the brown weed would have been here for my son's wedding.

Besides, having an extra day to work on the house, particularly cleaning my vehicles can only be good.

Since I made my entry early yesterday, I should say that I had a great dinner that was topped off by fireworks. Across the water there was some symphony for which the last piece was associated with fireworks. Couldn't really hear the music but we were perfectly placed to see the fireworks. The real neat part was that I had just decided to walk outside of the restaurant and was out there for all of the fireworks.

I didn't wake up to an alarm clock this morning, but I might as well have done so. I woke up at the same time the alarm was set for the previous days. At least this morning I was a little, well a lot, lazier getting around. I made sure I didn't leave anything but got out of there as soon as I could, I really wanted to get back and water, haul trash, unload and unpack, log on one last time to my work computer. Well, not that I really wanted to do any of that stuff but I didn't want to suffer the consequences of not doing them: dead plants, a stinky house, ...

The house was stinky enough with no air circulating for a few hours more than a week. So, even though the outside temperature was around 57, I still opened up a couple windows. The stink may have been from my stewing worm food. In the rush to leave, I didn't get it taken out. If it was the source of the not so bad odor that was taken care of by opening a couple windows, I didn't want to open the somewhat sealed garbage bucket and confirm a worse odor. Besides, come to think of it, I just took out all my paper in the paper recycling.

I had thought to fix dinner so stopped at Whole Foods and got something to fix. But by the time I got everything else done, I didn't feel like fixing, or eating. Oh well, there is always tomorrow and I did have two meals, literally, for lunch. Now to clear my bed of unpacked but not stowed stuff, get ready and go to bed.

No more alarm clocks! At least not until the next time I need to guarantee I'm up in time, hopefully not until the next NLN Conference in Orlando in 2010. I hadn't realized how much not having to get up to an alarm clock had become part of my Life after Layoff. Its not that I'm not industrious, or don't even get up early, I think it's just the symbol, the wrong symbol, that an alarm clock stands for.