Summer Schedule

My summertime schedule will start somewhere between 2am or 4am every morning and go upstairs to the art/writing room and start writing. Not because I want to get up before the rest of the world wakes up, but because when you get to my age, you’re going to wake up for one reason or another.

The hip hurts.

The knee hurts.

The old ankle injury has decided to make a comeback.

My shoulder hurts, my back hurts, or I walked for an hour the day before and now all the above hurt. Or maybe I never went to bed in the first place because I couldn’t fall asleep.

Because the hip hurts.

The knee hurts.

The ankle hurts.

The shoulder is making my hand go numb again. 

And my back is killing me…

I lifted something too heavy. Don’t really remember what it was now, but at the time, I apparently “needed” to lift it. I knew I shouldn’t have while I was doing it but did it anyway. And now I’m paying for it. 

Or all the above.

So around 6:30am, I’ll close my computer and head back downstairs, change clothes, straighten up a few things, and by 7am I’m out the door. I’ll spend the next hour walking around the subdivision up and down hills trying to convince myself this is all somehow healthy.

Then I’ll come home, cool off, eat a healthy breakfast, shower, change clothes, and head back upstairs to the computer for another couple of hours. One of those hours will probably be spent illustrating another children’s book.

Around 11am, I’ll come back downstairs for a couple hours of housework: vacuuming, dusting, cleaning bathrooms – all the glamorous things people dream about when they think of summer vacation.

Then I’ll head back upstairs for another computer session, maybe writing a newspaper story or maybe spending an hour doing something else equally time-consuming that I suddenly convinced myself is “important.”

Around 12:30pm, I’ll come downstairs again and eat a quick healthy lunch (probably a salad with chicken or turkey on top of it) and then head outside to work in the yard until about 3 o’clock.

At that point I’ll come back in, take another shower, change clothes again, go to the grocery store, buy food, and come home so my wife will have a nice hot supper when she gets home from work.

But my summertime schedule is vastly different from my granddaughters’ summertime schedules.

Their schedule basically goes like this:

Sleep until late morning or maybe an hour before noon.

Get on their phones.

Get off their phones long enough to eat lunch.

Get back on their phones.

Get off their phones to go play soccer.

Get back on their phones.

Get off their phones to eat dinner.

Get back on their phones.

Get irritated because their granddad tells them they’ve been on their phones too much.

Get off their phones to take a shower and get ready for bed.

Then get back on their phones again.

And finally, eventually, go to sleep.

Unless, of course, they stay on their phones half the night.

I don’t really know what they’re doing at that hour because by then I’m trying to go to sleep but probably can’t because everything mentioned above still hurts. So then, I’m back upstairs on the computer around 2am writing another newspaper story.

Just like this one.