The weekends, from here on out

I’ve had to adjust my lifestyle. I am a person who is not super-fond of change, so I find myself struggling to come to grips with certain lifestyle shifts that have been necessary of late. I have major issues. Right now they are:

- now that we are at the lake every weekend, when the hell am I supposed to do my laundry?
- Now that I have to pack a cooler every weekend, what do I eat for lunch?

I am not used to confronting these kinds of questions. To the first, my solution has so far been to do a load or two every weeknight evening, but the wardrobe’s been a bit disjointed as a result. We find ourselves having to wear either all white or all black, or all bright colours. Hubby’s solution has been to drag out some of his clothes from the olden days and so one day last week he went to work looking like a gigolo. I was sleepy in the morning and didn’t catch it until he picked me up at 5:30 p.m. That shirt is now going into the ironing basket and never coming out.

It has also resulted in my forgetting that I have a load in the washer that needs to go in the dryer, so several times this week I’ve gone to the basement to discover a dank, soggy load of laundry in the washer left over from the night before that doesn’t smell so hot, and has to be re-washed. This is what happens when you start doing laundry at 10 p.m.

The answer to the second question is not so simple. I am not a fan of sandwiches per se, and I find lunch kind of a stressful meal to prepare. Breakfast is easy: eggs, bread, bacon, done. Cereal and milk? Done. Oatmeal, water, and a microwave? Done. Dinner is more complex but a bit more creative, and it’s not unreasonable to fire up the stove/campfire/BBQ to cook a meal at dinnertime, planned around one central meat item.

But lunch? I resent cooking at lunch, so it has to be something cold and easy to prepare. Salads require a lot of ingredients and don’t always travel well, and don’t fill up a man who’s been working in the bush with a chainsaw. Sandwiches require luncheon meats, the majority of which I find kind of disgusting, and the right blend of condiments and toppings that don’t make your bread soggy. To really avoid sogginess you have to bring all the ingredients in the cooler separately, which requires packing them all up individually in space-hogging containers. And then there’s the fact that I don’t love sandwiches. They’re too limp and bready or something. I can handle a bun, but I don’t keep buns in the house (I don’t know why) so it always requires a trip to the store. See? Lunch is fraught. I prefer to snack and snack and snack in the middle of the day but hubby loves a lunch. Last night we had a ‘serious’ conversation about how he doesn’t feel like we can adequately share our love because we don’t enjoy eating sandwiches together. “I wish that you loved sandwiches as I do. Then we could eat them together and truly feel united.”

At least now when we go up to the land I have a nice spot to prepare said sandwiches. Behold:

And then when we eat lunch, we are very civilized:

Rosie also enjoys the trailer.

It’s difficult because so far, she doesn’t wear shoes (though I have my eye on these. Just kidding . They're more expensive than mine.) so she can’t take them off when she comes inside and she tracks dirt all over the place. I took that lovely picture of the kitchen knowing that the dirty futon in the background is my new reality. Luckily it’s pretty sandy all around the trailer so unless it’s wet out, the dirt brushes off easily, but the floor ends up being kind of grubby all the time. Next weekend we are building a deck out front of the trailer so there will be an added level of distance between dirty feet and trailer floor. I need to also keep a foot-washing bucket handy by the door, because I don’t want dirty feet in the beds.

We haven’t yet slept in the trailer overnight (what is WITH this summer?), but I will surely report back when we do. I took a nap but that doesn't count. So far, we have only gone up for the day, to enjoy the front yard: