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I’m starting to think that I have an unreasonable number of Things I’m Supposed to Do Every Day. I didn’t post last night because I got home from work, had dinner, and collapsed; I was in bed by 8:00 and dead to the world by nine, and at around 8:40 it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged yet and I almost got out of bed to write a quick post. The thing is, I don’t know how many different things is a reasonable number of things that I do every day, or at least do so often that I notice if I don’t do them on any particular day. Shall we list them? Why not!

Blog. Now, granted, I don’t do this every day, but I’m trying to write more this year than last year and I really don’t like taking more than one day off a week. At one point I went for around (nearly?) two years without missing a day. I don’t feel the need to build up that kind of streak again but I definitely want missed days to be infrequent.
The Whole Year Puzzle. My wife got me this thing for Christmas; that’s it up there; I probably should have taken the pieces out, but you get the idea– the months are across the two rows at the top and the rest are days, from 1-31, and supposedly you can rearrange the wood pieces to show every single day of the year. There are multiple ways for most (all?) of the days, too– every time Bek and I have compared our days (she has one too) they have been different. It’s set to Feb 11 because I try to keep it a day ahead. I didn’t do this yesterday either, so today I did the 10th and the 11th, because I can’t skip a day.
Wordle. You all know what Wordle is. Takes two minutes, most days. My longest unbroken streak of wins was 167. It’s been 292 days since I skipped one. Prepare for a NYT games streak, by the way.
NYT Mini Crossword. Generally under a minute. I occasionally go on tears where I’ll do the regular crossword every day, but the longer ones can take over an hour and I don’t usually want to burn that much time. The Mini is much shorter.
Spelling Bee, also an NYT game. I win this every day and I try to do it without any clues. I’m not successful at that terribly often– maybe once or twice a week. That said, I usually only need clues for the last four or five words at most, and there are sometimes up to 70 words. I don’t actually play Connections very often because I’m terrible at it. I lose more often than I win.
Duolingo. I’m back on my Arabic again; I deleted all my progress and started over, but I’m doing a full … circle? Lesson? Whatever they call them, I’m doing one of them a day.
Busuu. I’m keeping a streak up here as well. Busuu breaks down into chapters and lessons; I’m in Chapter 4, Lesson 5, and shit is getting complicated fast. That said, I’m still doing a lesson a day. It’s a lot harder than Duolingo but I feel like I’m learning more effectively. That said, the tiny font is still killing me. I may switch this to my iPad to see if the increased screen real estate leads to bigger letters. I could learn to read this damn language if I could just see it.

The weird thing is looking at that right now, I feel like it’s not that much? But I also feel like I spend way too much of every day thinking about whether I’ve finished xxx yet or not, and that might be a sign that it’s time to cut some stuff. How can I do all this and still spend six hours fucking around on TikTok every night? I gotta keep my priorities straight, people!

My mother-in-law passed away in January. She died of… well, everything. That’s both less disrespectful and closer to the truth than you might believe; my father-in-law is fond of saying she had everything but cancer, and the way he describes it never fails to bring this to mind:

My wife’s family, for reasons that have never been clear to me, does not seem to be overly fond of winter funerals. This is, I think, the third family member of hers who has passed since we were married, all of them in the dead of winter, and each and every one had a spring funeral. There has thus far been no service of any kind, and the first formal acknowledgment of her death is going to be May 20th when her ashes are interred. In, uh, this:

She went to see her dad today, and he showed her this; her ashes are inside of it (presumably inside some sort of urn and not, like, poured out all over the bottom of the thing) at this very moment and in fact were there when the picture was taken, but he’d decided he wanted to inter a few other things with her– among which were a crucifix, which my son took one look at and excitedly declared to be a “trophy.” He, being the eminently practical and utterly unsentimental person that he is, looked around the house and decided that this plastic goddamned cooler was the most size-appropriate object he had for the items he wanted to bury with her. And the decision was made; this was to be her eternal resting place, tradition and propriety be damned.

My wife enquired as to whether the gravediggers knew that they were providing a hole for a cooler and not a (presumably) much smaller urn. He, of course, had already made all of the appropriate arrangements. I guarantee he measured the damn thing and sent them precise metric dimensions. Guarantee it. He’s going to do some work in the next few days to get it glued shut and waterproofed (and judging from the way the man wraps Christmas presents, life on Earth will be extinct before water gets inside this thing) and that’s going to be it.

The great part of all this, of course, is that absolutely no one can argue with me when I insist on burying her father’s ashes inside an empty bottle of Beefeater gin when he dies. He’ll appreciate it.