Monday My Weekend Day

Since the end of my working life on the morning of 20 April 2024, Mondays have stood out not as the start of the work week, but as a free, quiet morning. What Saturdays were like when I was a kid, rushing to watch the cartoons, with no plans. Later, at noon, I would play Dungeons & Dragons, starting on Saturday until 1 or 2 in the morning.  I remember “Elric” listing off all the monsters we defeated, magic items taken, and treasure counts, and David W looking up the experience points late at night for the monsters. We would then discover if our characters had gone up any levels and grumble or rejoice. Back in the 1980s, Saturday was a glorious day, and now so is Monday for me.

My friends and family with jobs are back to work, and the rush that is the weekend is over. Now I do not have to rush through all my tasks and fun in just two days, like others do. I do laundry on Mondays and Fridays, but with The Machine still broken and the wash done Saturday morning, that was off the list. I wrote and finished the blog covering Sunday, and then read. I dressed, wrote a card for Mom Wild to mail on Monday, and soon I was ready to tackle the rest of my free day.

I headed to Happy Panda for a Chinese-style lunch. I like their food, though it is American creations. The little bowl of hot and sour soup, a veggie spring roll, and chicken with cashews full of chopped water chestnuts seems to appeal to me. I looked at world cruises, having spoken to Deborah about them earlier. Although it is hard to imagine spending 100+ days on a cruise ship (for $50K for two via Cunard with a balcony), the experience still appeals to me as incredible. I suspect I would start helping out with waiting on tables, cooking, and cleaning to find something new to do between stops. Start on my captain’s license and all that. Just daydreaming while eating my excellent lunch and searching on my laptop.

I returned home and discovered an email from Fidelity that my 401K balance was too low for them to keep, as I was no longer employed by Nike. Hmmmm. I had transferred this already. I called and waited ten minutes to talk to Trent, and he explained that a residual amount generated by my previous holding had been added to my previously zero balance. With little effort, this will be sent as yet another check for US Bank Wealth Management to add to their holding for me in my IRA.

I had a headache, and the food helped, and the IRA stuff, getting something fixed, brightened my day. I also talked to Sam at US Bank, who manages my IRA, and he is happy to meet and take the check. I headed to Market of Choice to get some supplies, including toilet paper, which was down to one last roll! I drove the few minutes to the new store in the new strip mall in Reed’s Crossing. It is a fantastic store, though not as cheap as some, and I managed to get overpriced Italian-style sweet sausage and cheap porkchops (for another day). I also found boxes of dried pasta made in Portland (I love to get local stuff). Paul Newman’s Sock-it-to-me sauce was on special, and I got a jar.

Corwin was at the house when I returned. He was using my tools to repair his phone. He had dropped it. Lucky for him, he was able to reseat the SIM card, and the phone was back. He headed out.

Kenneth Branagh does an excellent Hercule Poirot and is willing to make some good updates to the stories and characters. I purchased the online version of Murder on the Orient Express, which was a fun update of the book. I then ran that on the laptop while I did the dishes, and then started heating the sauce from a bottle, fried the sausage to a nice brown, and boiled the pasta. I also had garlic bread that I forgot, and it was dark and crispy when I finally remembered it. It was still good.

I had too many bowls of pasta and slices of bread while the re-worked and slightly too Hollywood version of the tale spun out. I would recommend the 1974 version as closer to the book, but this version by Kenneth Branagh is a fantastic spectacle of the current movie style. Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Nile is, in my opinion, his best reworking and recreation of the 1920s-30s story, with significant rewrites of entire sections. A Haunting in Venice rewrites and changes the setting of an excellent story–Recommended.

I look forward to his next Hercule Poirot in 2027!

Stuffed, I did all the dishes and rested for a bit. It was not late. While cooking, I discovered there was wine left, which may help explain why I forgot about the garlic bread. It was a 90-rated red wine! I did say good night to Deborah as she was already in bed. We also learned a new word from my new history book: irenic. Meaning aimed at peace. It was used to describe the first Assyrian times.

I managed to add a paragraph to my SciFi story and read more Assyrian history until I was nodding off and confusing the names of the kings, cities, and sites.

I quickly fell asleep once in my PJs and under the covers and had taken my pills. I woke up in the morning to find the AC set to low, freezing me for the first time. Hmm.

Thanks for reading!