The first week of bachelorhood...

With a title like that, you may need some assurance that I am still mostly alive and not quite starving. *cough* :) Some of you may know, but I successfully banished the Tillotsons on a two week trip around the north western United States. :)

After being too busy to blog for a week, don't expect a short post here. lol

Before they left, I was given several pieces of advice. Some from Catherine, and some from a friend at church. Catherine advised me against having girls, booze, and loud music. My friend suggested that I transform the T's house into a regular hotel during their absence. He thought buying a billboard along I-80 would be sufficient advertising. With advice like this, I was confident I wouldn't have any problems.

The T's didn't leave though until after they had compiled a mile long chore list and graciously handed it to me. All it involved was watering plants, checking garden, feeding critters, and taking out the dumpsters on the appropriate day. A piece of cake! Or so I thought.

The T's "supposedly" left at 8:00 A.M sharp this last Monday morning. When I woke up that day, I didn't fully understand my ignorance of several very important details. Boy, was I in for a reality check!

The work day went relatively smoothly until mid afternoon. I was busy with a house call, and Rance was solo at the shop. (Rance is 35 and volunteered to assist me during the T's vacation/business trip.) But more about Rance later. :) *chuckles*

Before Ben left, he notified a framing customer that her photo was complete and had scheduled to pick it up on this day. Well... it was embarrassing. Benjamin hadn't told us the photo was done, he hadn't told us where the photo was, and he hadn't told us the price. So in strolls the customer asking for her print, and we were totally clueless. Right about this time, Ben and Michael were rock climbing and couldn't be contacted. It was even more embarrassing that she had come from out of town specifically to get her picture. Thankfully, she was understanding and said she would stop in next week.

When getting a hold of the T's. I call Michael first, (he answers occasionally), then Benjamin, (his answering habits are even less) and finally faithful K. :) Finally getting a hold of K, I find out that Michael had lost his blackberry somewhere while rock climbing. Needless to say, I wasn't too surprised. It isn't the first time he has lost it. Later, Benjamin called me from Michael's phone and gave us the information we should have had before they left. (Yes, he left it in the car)

After this interesting ordeal, the rest of the business hours went smoothly. That night, I examined "the list" and set reminders on my phone for everything I was going to forget. I divied up the weekly tasks on different days hoping to maintain some pleasure time. But I was sadly mistaken.

TCS.net is officially closed at 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, but I usually don't get back to the house til 5:30 or later. This leaves plenty of time to make supper plans! JK

I glance at the list and end the watering cycle for the past week by watering the pine trees.

Entering the forbidden kitchen, I quickly realized my minimal knowledge. Attempting to decipher the T's food storage logic was too difficult. Starting with the fridge, I deep cleaned it and moved the many foreign substances to another location. I then opened the cupboards and sorted the known from the unknown. (The unknown pile was substantially larger) :)

By this time, it was past 10:00 p.m, and I still hadn't eaten supper! So I grabbed some fritos, set my alarm for 6:30 (15 minutes earlier than normal) and headed for bed. Very healthy, I know. ;)

The next morning I learned very quickly that I couldn't make breakfast, have devotions, feed animals, make lunch, and get ready to go in that short time period. Breakfast was very poorly planned. I was told that waffles were left for me, but I couldn't find them for the life of me! I finally found them in the freezer, and managed to burn one to a crisp in the oven trying to defrost it quickly. Being the only food in more than 12 hours, it tasted delicious!

The bread was another story. I foolishly waited until the morning of to find the bread. After scrummaging awhile, I found it in the freezer, frozen solid! I was dismayed. How was I supposed to have sandwiches for lunch with frozen bread? This was the first time Google came in handy.

A quick search revealed that wrapping the bread in aluminum foil and turning the oven on 400 degrees would do the trick. Bingo! After a few minutes the bread was totally thawed and ready for sandwiches! I said a quick prayer of thankfulness after that episode. :)

It became very obvious when I was still throwing together a quick lunch at 8:15 that I had to readjust my schedule the next day.

Rushing to work, I opened up the shop and dreaded lunch time. Seeing my puny lunch Monday prompted Rance to buy me some Lays. It was soo thoughtful of him! This day went pretty smoothly.

After locking up for the night, I headed back to the house resolving to start the watering cycle again for the week. Scrutinizing the list, it began to dawn on me what the rest of the week would look like. :(

Let's just say that the Tillotsons don't water in some kind of hap hazard or disorganized fashion. They have systematically engineered their watering schedule and sprinklers to achieve the maximum effectiveness. I knew after that night, that my proposed list, for the week, would never get accomplished.

Let me explain the watering schedule as simply as possible. Basically, the T's own two sprinklers. One of them is massive and has fewer customizations, and the other is smaller and easily customizable for any watering task. The priority list goes like this: gardens, flower beds, and grass.

The requirement is that everything receives 1 inch of water per week. The larger sprinkler takes 4 hours to get 1/2 inch with a complete arch, and the smaller one takes only 30 minutes. The ground can only hold 1/2 inch at a time, so this requires too separate watering times to complete the cycle for each week. The sprinklers have to be moved a minimum of 18 times to get everything watered sufficiently at the proper intervals.

The T's tend two gardens. One at some friends of theirs, and their own at their house. The other garden is about 2.9 miles away or takes approximately 10 minutes to get there.

A few more outdoor tasks involve picking the 6 green bean rows every three days (approx. 20 feet long each), cut brocoli once or twice a week, pick zucchini, pick cucumber, and pick tomatoes. (The list adds the qualifier: "when they are ripe" haha...)

The rest of the list was pretty simple. Feed the fish morning and evening, feed mouse, (Ralph died), and prepare trash and recycling.

After getting the sprinklers going, I made a quick trip to Walmart and bought some noodles and some ingredients for chow mein. By this time, it was about 9:00. (Boy time goes fast when you have to do everything!) Since I hadn't yet had supper, my stomach informed me it was time to eat. The T's informed me that they had left some spaghetti sauce for me. Digging through the fridge hadn't found it, so I headed for the freezers. After rummaging through the large freezer for quite some time, I was about to give up, when I remembered they had another little freezer above the fridge. Ah ha! There it was, frozen like a rock. Brilliant!

I was starving my this time, and didn't want to wait for supper any longer! Thank God, I devised a quick way to get it defrosted. After that task was completed, I had sauce but again I foolishly didn't start the noodles until after the sauce was thawed. By the time everything was ready, I ate supper at about 10:15 that night.

That night, I made the "hard" decision to get up at 5a.m. A quick weather check revealed 50% chance of rain the following day. (This means, no watering!) Believe me, I begged God to bring it here. But alas, we only got 10 hundredths of an inch. Wednesday morning went much smoother and I was actually on time for work! I was relieved!

The day went relatively smoothly, but was the beginning of a very troublesome computer that originally had major problems. But I will leave the technical details out of this post.

That day I realized I was being forced to cook something for myself. I had only one more meal of spaghetti and that was for supper Having very little confidence in my cooking skills prompted me to go back to Google and youtube to find a live recipie for chow mein. Finding a decent recipie, I realized I was missing a few ingredients. One very important one. Soysauce!

So I ate the rest of the spaghetti, finished the watering cycle for the night and retired for bed.

The next morning, was Thursday. By this time, I had my schedule down pat. Wake up at 5:00 A.M, start the sprinklers, shower, get breakfast, get lunch, go to work at 7:50 and come back at 5:00 p.m.

After a hectic day at work, mostly involving the computer we started on Wednesday, I went to Walmart to purchase the remaining chow mein ingredients. Having nothing anymore in the house to eat, I began making the chow mein. I said another prayer and headed back to the computer to outline the process on paper and began cutting vegetables. After I was done, I wasn't sure what to call the dish. It wasn't chow mein, it wasn't fried rice, but what was it? It was delicious though, so I didn't really care. Lesley called it, "Chow mein a la Seth" and I called it poor man's chow mein.

Anyway, I just barely managed to get to bed before midnight after cleaning up my kitchen mess.

The next day, Friday, was another rough day. After being awake a couple hours, I was already out of energy from having less than 6 hours of sleep the rest of the week. But God somehow gave me the strength, but I still didn't get that troublesome computer completed. Halfway into the afternoon, my cousins from Cozad (Josh and Katrina) stopped by because of computer problems and we later did Mexican that night. I also gave them a treehouse tour, and pushed Katrina on the swing. It was soo funny!

The next day was Saturday! Hooray! I woke up at a decent hour, 8:00 A.M and decided to get the outdoor tasks done before the heat of the day.

The tillotsons had also instructed me to mow the lawn today. So I opened the garage door and discovered that they had wedged the lawnmower in between the work bench and the Honda. Txt'ng Kristin, I find out that they didn't leave me any keys to move the car. Michael suggested finding a couple guys to drag the car, (who would have guessed) but I thought that hot wiring would be much easier and tons more fun. :)

I restrained my longing to do some damage and managed to twist and yank the lawnmower out. After completing the mowing, I decided that 11:14 was the time to have my first meal of the day. Well... not quite. I still hadn't made french toast. So I googled again, found a wikihow, made a milk trip, and made the french toast. By 1 P.M. I was enjoying the first course of my brunch. :) I then cooked green beans, and made some outstanding dark chocolate brownies!

I still had some dark chocolate left in my room, and thought that I should do something with it. Thanks to cookingforengineers.com, I found a easy to follow recipie with detailed pictures for every step and successfully made those brownies.

I teased K about how delicious they were and told her I wouldn't save one for her until she asked nicely enough. The first time, her request was rather lame but did include numerous smiley faces. :) But the second time, she won me over, with beautiful picture combined with a please! :)

And that is my week in brief. lol

So what do you think? Do you think I fit the qualities and living conditions of true bachelors?

Hmm... only 2,140 words, not bad. :)