Week in the Life: Monday, November 4

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