"Lounge" "Junk"

The weekend is here and these days are passing so quickly. We have now been home as a family for the past five days and I am not sure where those days have gone!!! I do believe in spite of the circumstances over the past two years this time has gone by very quickly and now ever since my release five months ago the speed in which the time has gone into overdrive. Here it is a Saturday morning and my wife was awake early so she could check out the garage sales in the area.

Prior to our move two years ago we sold our family room set which was due to be sold or thrown into the trash as it approached being 20 years old. We didn’t sell any other pieces of furniture and other then the family room and the “lounge” (the children’s name for the loft area) every room is furnished. My wife wanted to look for a couch for the family or “lounge” and came away with a very good deal on a couch for the “lounge”. Basically it amounted to carting the couch away from the garage and despite a few markings the couch will serve its purpose for the children in the “lounge”.

My wife was out as the time approached the start of the Saturday morning Gamblers Anonymous meeting and I called my wife to tell him to take her time because I didn’t want her to hurry back. She would have hurried back because she knows (as she stated) how important the GA meetings are to me and my recovery but I am doing my best to strike a balance between all the facets in my life. This morning I specifically did not venture to the gym so my wife could go out early to the garage sales. I too understand the importance of GA to my well being but I am trying to tie everything in my life together.

My wife how has been nothing short of amazing wanted to come home so I could get to the meeting on time but after a few minutes I did convince her to continue her quest. This is when she found the couch for the “lounge” and when she came home the two of us carried the couch up to the “lounge”. This was fun, although the couch wasn’t very heavy for me my poor wife struggled going up the stairs.

I have become even more patient over these past few years and I know a situation such as this one would have prompted me to say something I shouldn’t so this morning I remained silent. In fact the ill-fated words just weren’t there for me. I am having such a great time enjoying the moment my cynical side is slowly fading away. I wouldn’t say it is gone because that would be quite an undertaking and I did notice a few cynical remarks when we went shopping on Friday. Again, I believe this is another balancing act because there are some appropriate (or at least I think so) times for cynical remarks because this is a fabric of my personality and I wouldn’t be true to myself. I don’t believe my cynical remarks are meant to be hurtful at all but it appears to be a positive that I am not even thinking about these remarks when in the past I couldn’t help myself.

The day was spent moving the boxes to their appropriate areas and I spent a good portion of the morning cutting the already used boxes. I lost count after 40 which meant we had unpacked 40 boxes since we got home on Monday and really it doesn’t even put a dent in what is remaining. We have too much stuff and hopefully as we unpack we can minimize some of this stuff. I also spent much of the morning trying to locate our telephone. I found the second telephone in the cordless package but could not locate the base which controls the first and second telephone while housing the answering machine. I thought I opened every box and looked through those boxes as well to no avail. I would have thought the telephone would have been in one of the kitchen boxes because this is where it was stationed in our old house.

However; all of the kitchen boxes had been opened and unpacked with no telephone in sight. I am sure it will emerge in the coming days and I did find my wife’s knives set in a box marked “junk”. Yes, I labeled this box and for the life of me I have no idea why I would label it “junk”. I think this was my cynical side talking two years ago. In any event the telephone still remains at large.

We are taking our time unpacking and today wasn’t the most efficient day. I did cut all of the used boxes and there is much more room in the garage. Most of the boxes are in their perspective area with exception of the guest room and the many boxes labeled “playroom”. The guest room may house a border in the coming months so we are reluctant to unpack any of these boxes into this room since in our previous house the guest room was more of a storage room.

We have the same square feet in this house then we had in the previous but it really seems like we have more stuff as opposed to less stuff. My perspective could be way off because I spent 19 ½ months living out of a 9 cubic foot space so anything larger then this appears grandiose. A good example of this is our King size Bed which looks an enormous expanse of a mattress because I had been living on an extended baby’s mattress over the past two years. Yes, my dear friend’s supplied me with a Queen Size bed which too looked large comparatively speaking but now the King Bed is certainly a large piece of mattress.

The day was over very quickly and we were headed over our dear friend’s house to play a game. My wife took me up on my offer to sit with the children so she could join her dear friend at the movies. They went to see “Sex and the City” while the husbands played “Cash flow for Kids” with the daughters. Our sons are a little too young for this game and the two 10 year olds grasped the game quite well. This game teaches children the value of money and is quite good. An unnecessary expense is labeled a “Do-Dad” which I think is a perfect moniker. My daughter now understands it is not good to buy something if you don’t have the money to pay for it and the fact that she thinks all credit cards are bad is certainly a positive.

We had a good time playing the game while the boys watched “Star Wars”. They were watching Star Wars #4 which to me is Star Wars #1 since it came out almost thirty years ago. It took me 25 years to finally see this movie and were our two seven year old sons enjoying the movie. I believe the movie has been digitally remastered but essentially everything else is the same. I thought this was ironic that they were enjoying such an “old” movie but hey action is action to 7 year old boys!!