My alarm wakes me up at 7 a.m. and Lila is snuggling with me. I had taken off my CPAP mask earlier in the night because it was bugging me (I have to wear it for at least 4 hours a night, and sometimes I try just to hit that threshold). We snuggle for a good 15 minutes. She kisses my hand and gnaws on my finger and lets me pet her belly. It’s a very good snuggle sesh!

I get up around 7:15, feed the girls, and then sit on the couch to play Duolingo and my NYT games. Around 7:45, I get up to make breakfast and coffee—something easy today, just oatmeal. While I eat breakfast, I scroll through the Reddit forum for The Summit. Yep, we’re all frustrated by this show!

I do my morning routine (the whole thing today, even skincare!) and halfway through, my mom Facetimes me to chat about Survivor (she wasn’t able to watch it last night, but watched it this morning). We chat for a few minutes. Then I make the mistake of scrolling through Instagram and get caught up in some comment threads. Don’t do this, you guys. It’s not worth it. Eventually, I make myself get up to finish my morning routine and then it’s time to work.

I spend a few hours working and I’m surprisingly productive. It’s nice when I can compartmentalize work life vs what’s going on in the world. I take a break around 11:15 to give the girls some treats and take a short walk to pick up my mail. And it’s a very good mail day! I get a check from Bank of America, the company that held my loan for Gladys (my car that got flooded during Hurricane Helene), because I overpaid on my loan. It’s a nice chunk of change, too! And I get two postcards – one from Birchie and one from both Kyria and Elisabeth!

I’m not yet hungry for lunch so I decide to work a little more. I clear out my emails, do a bit of editing, and QA posted content. And then I get completely absorbed in the task of checking on our writers’ assignments. I do this a couple times a month to make sure their numbers match up to what I originally assigned to them at the end of the previous month. Sometimes things get wonky – like the writer who suddenly had 20 pages more than I originally planned for him to have! Whoops. I quickly fix that. I start getting hungry around 12:30 but I’m focused on this task and want to get it done before I stop for lunch… and it’s not until 12:50 that I remember I have a 1pm meeting. I’m not going to have time to eat lunch before the meeting so I’m gonna be really hungry.

Oh, well – not much I can do about it! The 1pm meeting is to introduce our new senior director (aka, my new boss!) to our content team. It’s a great meeting, although I cringe a little when our writers have to introduce themselves and “say a fun fact.” They do a good job, though! Once the meeting is over, I immediately eat lunch! I am definitely having a blood sugar drop—I am a little shaky and feel very warm. Thankfully, my lunch is an easy one: I picked up a Pub sub last night and saved half of it for lunch today. I just have to grab the sub, some chips, and a Dr. Pepper and I’m good to go. I eat lunch while scrolling through Survivor’s Reddit forum.

I have another meeting at 2pm, but it’s just an information session about our 2025 benefits. I listen in while working on this post and doing some easy work tasks. I’m not happy about the changes, especially because it seems they’re just removing some benefits without putting anything new or better in their place. Great. Once the meeting is over, I work for a little bit and then decide I need a short siesta. I take a 30-minute nap on the couch.

I do a little more work before I need to hop into a meeting, which is a pretty good brainstorming session with other managers. We’re trying to resource plan, which is hard when there are parameters we’re dealing with. But we do the best with what we have! It’s a good meeting, though, and when it’s over, I realize I have just a few minutes before my therapy appointment!

I’ve been both looking forward to this appointment and dreading it. Mostly dreading it because talking to someone new + describing my emotions out loud + dealing with the hard things = not my fave thing. But I know I need this appointment and the timing feels serendipitous.

The therapy appointment goes really well! I like her a lot, even more when she tells me she voted for Harris so at least I know she understands my sense of despair. She also gives me some tangible things to do when I’m having a panic attack, which I appreciate. From therapy, I have learned the why behind my panic attacks but not the coping skills to implement when they happen. Hopefully, they help! And hopefully, I don’t need to use them anytime soon.

After therapy, I lay on my bed for a bit, scrolling social media (which was not a smart decision) and the girls come up on the bed for cuddles, which I very much appreciate. Eventually, I get up, feed them dinner, and take a bubble bath. I order dinner while in the bath and also play some games on my phone. Out of the bath, I sit on the couch and read my book until my dinner arrives.

Grooming session

When it comes, I eat at the table with my laptop, scrolling through Reddit forums and blogs.

I turn on the Thursday Night Football game and watch it off and on while reading my book. My mom Facetimes me and we chat for a while. When I hang up with her, I finish my book and then come back to my laptop to work on this post, read/comment on blogs, and respond to blog comments. And then I’m not really sure what I do with the rest of my evening, other than tidying up the apartment, playing games on my phone, and watching the TNF game. But suddenly it’s 11:30 and I need to go to bed! My nighttime routine is shit this week.

thursday in the life: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

I wake up at 3 a.m., grab my phone, and pull up CNN. Trump won. I can’t believe this is happening. What is wrong with our country?

It takes me a while to fall back to sleep, but eventually, I do and I wake up again around 6:45 and remember what happened. Today is going to be a bad day. The next four years will be a slew of bad days. I send the famous Michael Scott “please God no” GIF to my book club group chat because that’s just about how I feel right now.

Eventually, my bladder tells me I need to get up so I deal with that and feed the girls. Then I sit on the couch to play Duolingo, my NYT games, and Happy Color. I also read a few chapters of my book, which is my first time reading this week! (Very abnormal.)

Around 8, I force myself to make breakfast (scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage) and eat it while finishing up yesterday’s post. Once that’s published, I do an abbreviated morning routine (I skip the skincare—brush my teeth, get dressed, clean up the kitchen, deal with my CPAP machine, and take my meds) and then it’s time to work. I think??? Work feels impossible on a day like today.

But work I do. I clear out my email, edit content, do some posting, and handle some small to-dos that resulted from my leadership meeting yesterday. I was supposed to have a meeting with my team today but I’m not in the headspace for that so I move it to next week.

Around 10:45 my mom calls me to ask if I want to do a volunteer shift with her for Feeding America Tampa Bay. Well, this feels like something positive that I can do this month when things feel as depressing as they do today. We sign up to do a morning and afternoon shift next Wednesday. Then, we make plans for lunch.

I do a little more work when I hang up the phone with my mom and then drive over to our favorite local deli for lunch. I order my usual (turkey sammie on a croissant) and it hits the spot. My mom and I don’t talk much during lunch, which sometimes happens. We’re both thinking about a lot of things (we also got some distressing news about a family member earlier today, so it’s been a double whammy of terribleness) but we’re together and sometimes that’s what we need.

I get home from lunch a little after noon, work on this post, and then dive into a mindless work task. It’s exactly what I need.

I take a short nap when I finish my work task and it feels very nice to turn my brain off for a little while. Eloise spent the entire naptime with me, so when I wake up, I give her cuddles and she meows like crazy at me. Maybe she can sense I need a little extra love today? Before I get back to work, I scroll through my personal email and see that a package has arrived! It’s Sephora – I ordered some skincare products.

The rest of my workday goes pretty smoothly. I write some content that’s due this week but we haven’t been able to assign to writers. I post some content, answer emails, and handle some assignment issues that crop up. At some point, I pull out my snack pack to munch on and I also take a few breaks to read and comment on blogs.

Around 5:15, I wrap up my workday. I get ready for the gym, feed the girls, and then spend 10 minutes trying to find where I placed my Zevo replacement filters but they are nowhere to be found. WHY! I have no idea where they could be because I feel like I looked everywhere. But I’ll have to continue looking later because I need to leave.

My first stop this evening is Target to pick up a curbside order. Nothing exciting here – just household essentials like toilet paper, laundry pods, and distilled water. It’s a quick pit stop and then I’m on my way to the gym for HIIT class. Except I can never time these before-class errands correctly because I am a whole half-hour early. What I should do is go into the gym and do a short cardio workout. But what I do instead is sit in my car, playing games on my phone and reading blogs. I’ll get enough cardio during HIIT class.

A little before 6:30, I walk into the gym for HIIT class. And it’s a good one! I feel really strong during this workout – and I surprise myself by picking up the 20-lb weights for some of the stations. (At one point, I picked up one of the 20-lb weights and was like, “Oh, this isn’t as heavy as I thought!”) It feels good to see progress like that.

I leave the gym around 7:15, take a quick pit stop at Publix, and then drive home. It’s a struggle carrying all of my stuff up the stairs, but I get it done even though my heart is racing. I put away the food that needs to be refrigerated and then take a shower. Right as I’m finishing up my shower, it’s 8pm so I pull up my Paramount+ app to start streaming tonight’s episode of Survivor. I put on pajamas, brush out my hair, and then sit down on my couch to turn on Survivor on my TV. I eat my dinner while watching the show. Once the show is over, it’s time for The Summit. This new show on CBS isn’t my favorite (mostly because the contestants are very dumb), but it’s something mindless to watch on Wednesday evenings. While that show is on, I make cookies, work on this post, and respond to blog comments.

Once the show is over, I Facetime my mom and we talk about the show and other chit-chatty things. Then I pick up around my apartment, do an abbreviated nighttime routine, and finally go to bed around midnight.

wednesday in the life: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

I considered not publishing this post today. The bad thing did happen, and Trump was elected. I am still trying to process this news while feeling despair in the pit of my stomach. In the end, maybe you need something to read that isn’t depressing news about the future of the U.S. So that’s what I’m bringing you today.

***

My alarm wakes me up at 7 a.m. I take off my CPAP mask and turn off the machine, which is Lila’s cue to hop on the bed for morning snuggles. And then Eloise joins in on the fun! A great way to start today.

After one snooze of my alarm, I get up, feed the girls, and then sit on the couch for about 15 minutes playing phone games. Eventually, I get up to take a shower and then I sit down at my laptop to finish up yesterday’s post before doing my morning routine. Skincare, CPAP maintenance, emptying out the dishwasher, meds, etc. I also brush out my hair and bangs to let them air dry. Then, I make a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and eat it while reading and commenting on blogs. I make coffee, straighten my bangs, and put on eyebrow pencil/mascara since I have a few meetings today and need to look somewhat presentable.

Around 9, I sit down at my desk to start my workday, but before I can get anything done, there’s a knock at my door. It’s someone from maintenance to knock down the wasp nest that’s on my patio. WOOHOO! I noticed this huge wasp nest back in September and finally put in a maintenance request about it yesterday. The maintenance man made quick work of the nest and now I can go out on my patio again without fearing for my life. (I should be nicer to the wasps. They never really did anything. They were just living their lives in the nest they created, but I just needed them to have created it elsewhere.)

Now it’s finally time to work! I’m able to clear out my inbox, make some notes for this morning’s meeting, and edit a few pages of content before it’s time for my weekly leadership meeting. As always, there is a lot to discuss but it’s a productive meeting. I get some of my questions answers, so I leave the meeting feeling pretty good.

After the meeting, I get up from my desk and the girls think that means it must be time for treats. They get a handful of Temptations while I preheat my oven. I’m going to make a lunch of popcorn chicken, rice, and green beans since my original plan of Monday dinner leftovers didn’t pan out. Then I lay on the couch and decide to see if I can book a psychiatry appointment without calling my psychiatrist. (I’m a millennial stereotype, I know.) I can’t so I decide to look on Zocdoc for a new psychiatrist. LOL. Okay, I know this sounds like a huge overreaction but I had been thinking about looking for a new psychiatrist. and this was the push I needed to do that. I find someone who is on my insurance and accepting patients and she has lots of availability. Awesome! I schedule an appointment for Friday morning.

And since that felt so easy, I decide to also see if I could find a therapist on Zocdoc. I use Zocdoc a lot, but have never used it to find a therapist. One of the therapists I found seemed like a great fit for me but she only had availability this week and then nothing for the next few months. While I hadn’t planned to restart therapy this soon, I didn’t want to let this opportunity pass me by so I booked an appointment for Thursday at 5:15 p.m. Better start figuring out how to tell my life story to another therapist!

My oven was preheated so I pop the chicken in the oven and start working on this post. Then I do a bit of work before cooking the rest of my lunch. I eat while scrolling Reddit and then clean up the kitchen and feed the girls their lunch. Oh, and I also find out that my period started! Lovely. A perfect way to celebrate election day.

It’s back to work for me. During this working block, I prep meeting notes, answer emails and Slack messages, and then have a 30-minute meeting with some of our editors. Afterward, I start working through the intake paperwork my *new* therapist sent me and then my mom calls me! We chat for a bit and when I get off the phone, I decide to take a nap. Listen, it’s the first day of my period, I’m stressed about the election, and I went to bed late. I’m going to give my body the rest it needs.

When I wake up from my nap, I grab my snack pack from the fridge and do another hour-and-a-half of work. I opt for some easy tasks like editing content, posting content, and assigning out some ad-hoc requests that have come in. At 5:30, I call it a day and get ready to go to the gym. On my drive, I send a Marco Polo video to Mikaela.

My workout is a good one! I do the cardio machines – 15 minutes on the elliptical, 15 minutes on the treadmill, and 15 minutes on the stationary bike. My mom is taking the Tuesday night HIIT class and I can watch her progress since the cardio machines are situated right next to the room where they do HIIT. I’m not a huge fan of this HIIT instructor, which is why I didn’t take the class and when my mom finishes her workout and comes out to see me, she expresses frustration with him, too. (This is not our usual HIIT instructor whom we love!) I finish up my workout and Mom and I leave the gym together. I go with her to her car so she can give me a bag of stuff I left at her house on Sunday.

Then I drive home and sit on the couch for 20 minutes. My book club group text is going wild so I leave some messages, check in on some election results for Florida (mostly bad), and then make dinner. While it’s cooking, I work on this post, read/comment on blogs, and respond to comments. I do the same while eating dinner! (I am not watching any election coverage tonight. My heart can’t take it.) Once I finish eating, I’m reading blogs and Eloise decides to jump up on the table next to me and bug me. She bumps her head with my hand, puts her butt in front of my face, and pokes me with a claw. Okay, girl! You need some attention. I get out a new teaser and play with the girls for about 10 minutes. That’s two days of playtime in a row! These girls don’t know what to do with all of this attention.

After playtime, I take a bubble bath and spend far too long trying to solve today’s Wordle. (It took me 6 tries, but I was not going to be defeated!) My mom Facetimes me so we talk for about a half-hour. Once I hang up with her, I finish up my NYT games for the day and then get started on my nighttime routine. It’s an abbreviated routine tonight because I didn’t feel like doing my skincare routine. Instead, I tidy up my apartment, start the dishwasher, brush my teeth, and scoop the litter boxes. I also take breaks to read/comment on blogs and work on this post.

Around 11:30, I’m finally in bed. I scroll through some election coverage on CNN and my stomach is in knots when I learn that Trump has won Michigan and is leading in Pennsylvania. This is not good. I decide I just need to go to bed and get the results in the morning. I have a very hard time falling asleep.

tuesday in the life: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014

It’s time for Week in the Life! Originally, I was going to wait to do this series until a little further into November but I decided I needed it this week. The week where we will find out what the U.S. will look like for the next four years. So let’s do this!

It’s Monday and my alarm wakes me up at 7 a.m. I like to complain about the “fall back” time change, but I do love how it makes it a bit easier to wake up in the mornings since my body thinks it’s an hour later. Once my alarm goes off, I snooze it, tear off my CPAP mask, and turn off the machine. (Only one event per hour last night – woop!) The girls come up on the bed, which I like to pretend is because they want morning cuddles, but most likely it’s because they want breakfast.

I get up around 7:15 a.m., use the bathroom, and then get the girls their breakfast. I start a load of laundry and then I make breakfast. Today, it’s two fried eggs, two pieces of toast, and sausage. And coffee, of course.

I sit down at my kitchen table, open my laptop, and read some blogs while I eat breakfast and drink my coffee. A perfect way to ease into Monday!

I start my morning routine right around 8 a.m., which includes my five-step morning skincare routine, taking meds, filling up my water bottle, and doing tasks associated with my CPAP machine (wiping down my mask and rinsing out my humidifier). I also transfer the clothes into the dryer, start my dishwasher (since I didn’t do it the night before, oops), and do a little tidying around the apartment.

Before sitting down to work, I go outside for my 10 minutes of sunshine! There is this beautiful lake view right outside my apartment but nowhere to sit, wah. I spot a blue heron hanging out by the lake and apparently that’s a symbol of good luck. Hopefully, that bodes well for this week!

Around 9:00, I’m back home and Eloise has a lot of questions for me. (Meows on meows!) I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop. It’s time to get the workday started!

It’s a fairly easy morning for me. I don’t have any meetings today so I’m able to work on my own to-do list and get things done. I manage our contractor program and that takes up the bulk of my work. We have five contractors (but one of them is managed by someone else, which is super helpful!) and I’m responsible for their assignments, answering their questions, sending their content to clients, and making sure their content gets added to our clients’ websites. I spend the majority of my morning working through some of their tasks, like sending and publishing content. I also work on a report I send to our writers every Monday morning, clear out my inbox, and work on some ad-hoc tasks that came into our queue on Salesforce.

At 11:20, my stomach is a-grumbling so it’s time to stop working for my lunch break! Today, I’m eating this frozen meal that I picked up from Publix yesterday. It looked good so I hope it tastes good! While I nuke it in the microwave, I give the girls their first treats of the day (they each get 9 Temptations) and then work on an Instagram post. I eat lunch and scroll through the Love Is Blind forum on Reddit because I’m a sucker for drama. The frozen meal is actually quite tasty! (My dietician would have wanted me to have something else with this because these meals are pretty low in calories, but I figure I’ll be snacking in the afternoon to make up the deficit.) With the remainder of my lunch break, I play some games on my phone and work on this post.

Once my lunch break is over, I do a two-hour working block. I respond to more emails, work through my contractor to-do list, and write a page of content that was supposed to be done in October. I also start working on this new project I’m doing for our Salesforce content cases. Since there are around 500 of these cases… it’s going to take me a while. Bit by bit, right?

Once my working block is done, it’s time for a break. Yay! I give the girls their mid-afternoon meal and then take a short siesta. I’m tired today and a 30-minute power nap is just what I need. When I wake up, I start scrolling through my personal email and I’m delighted to see Amazon has dropped off a package.

Fun things! I didn’t realize the bottle of color sealer would be so big. I only need it when I’m washing my hair right after dyeing it (the last time I used it, I felt like it worked well to keep my color locked in for a good amount of time). Oh, well! I also bought a cleaning kit for my phone/laptop/Airpods. And the big daddy of them all: a digital keypad for my front door. My next-door neighbor just installed on of these in their home… so why not me?! I’m weighing the pros and cons of asking my apartment complex if I can install this or just doing it anyway and hoping I don’t get in trouble. Hmmmm.

Anyway, it’s soon back to work for my final working block of the day. But first, I need to get my snack pack! Since I am absolutely a child when it comes to food and I honestly have a hard time eating snacks in the afternoon because I find the process of preparing food to be tedious, I decided to buy a set of bento boxes. I filled four of them with nuts, Cheez-Its, dark-chocolate covered pomegranates, and fruit. Now when it’s time for my afternoon working block, I just grab the snack pack out of my fridge and can pick at it throughout the afternoon. Am I a genius? Maybe.

I’m working through my contractor tasks when my mom Facetimes me to ask if the refrigerator I listed on Facebook Marketplace for them has gotten any messages today. (They got a new fridge and are selling their old one.) Annnnd… that’s when I discover that I somehow changed the price of the fridge to $15,000. !!! That’s one expensive fridge! I quickly bring the price back down to a much more reasonable $150 and now it looks like I’m offering an incredible deal on a magical fridge. Hey, maybe this will help get it sold!

Once I get off the phone with my mom, I finish up my workday by sending off a bunch of meeting requests, following up on some Salesforce issues I had submitted tickets about, and answering emails. Oh, and I have a very cute digression for about 20 minutes when I decide I want to change all of my bookmarks to tab groups on Chrome. They look so colorful! I love them! Buuuut… I quickly realize I don’t really like these tab groups and how all these tabs open at one time. I’m not a million-tabs-open-at-a-time kinda gal, so while I’m sure tab groups work wonderfully for some people, it’s bookmarks or bust for me. But I decide to clean up my bookmarks a bit since things we’re looking a little crazy and now I’m very happy with the new, streamlined look.

It’s the little things, you guys.

Around 5:30pm, I close things down for the day. It was a good, productive day and I’m happy about that! Before I get dinner started, I work on this post for a bit and read/comment on a few blogs.

Tonight’s dinner plan was this homemade hamburger helper recipe I found on Skinnytaste’s website. I was excited to make it (and was planning on eating the leftovers for lunch the rest of the week), and was halfway through browning the meat when I looked at the recipe and realized I had forgotten to pick up one key ingredient (chicken broth). Ughhhh. I had to quickly pivot and use the browned meat for homemade nachos! All’s well that ends well.

I eat dinner in front of the TV, finishing up season one of Deal or No Deal Island. It was a good but also frustrating show at times. At some point during one of the episodes (I watched two), Eloise started meowing for attention so I decided it was the perfect time to get out a teaser and play with her! She loves this very cheap teaser the most and even Lila got in on the fun. (Lila’s not huge into teasers, but every now and then she’ll surprise me.) It was a good time all around and it reminded me why I need to play with them more. Afterward, I gave them a handful of Greenies.

Once my show was over, I Facetimed with my mom and we talked about the show (she watched it, too!) and then had a catch-up session for about 30 minutes. Then, I scrolled through the Reddit forum for Deal or No Deal Island to make sure everyone was as incensed about a few of the players as I was and then had to force myself up from the couch to start my nighttime routine.

There’s a lot to do before I go to bed; sometimes, I can get through my nighttime routine in 20 minutes or less but my apartment is a mess, I have clean dishes in the dishwasher that need to be put away so I can load in the dirty dishes in my kitchen sink, I have laundry to fold and put away, a multi-step skincare routine to do… whew. I do a little bit at a time and then sit down at my laptop to either read/comment on blogs, edit/add photos to this post, or respond to comments. I have the MNF game playing in the background (muted) and today’s episode of Pod Save America playing on my phone. The episode gives me hope and that feels terrifying. Will this turn out okay? Who knows. But maybe having hope right now isn’t the worst thing.

I finally finish up my nighttime routine around 11 (I was very, very slow tonight, ha) and that’s when the MNF starts to get interesting. Of course it goes into overtime so I have to watch it to the end. The game ends around 11:30 so it’s time for bed! CPAP mask on, lights off, and an ASMR video lulling me to sleep.

Yay or nay on Daylight Saving Time ending?

monday in the life: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2015. and 2014