October 20, 2025
So, I called in to work today. I did it for a couple of reasons – I work in an educational setting, and today is Day 1 of Fall Break. My entire building will be a ghost town; I don’t want to waste my last ever Everyday Life journal writing about how I am so bored, and I wish I were anywhere else besides sitting at this desk, in an empty office, available for people who will definitely not come in. Staff often take days off this week, so it won’t be a big deal at work. I also want to be productive at home today; I did quite a lot of tidying up and other cleaning over the weekend and would like to follow through with that. I often am sitting at work wishing I could go get other stuff done if not for being stuck at work. It’s also supposed to be a nice cool fall day, and I’d like to enjoy it! A day at home with S is way better than sitting around waiting to come home. And my baseball team, the one in Canada, is one of 3 remaining in the MLB post-season, and they will be in a decisive Game 7 tonight, to see if they can get to the World Series…my nerves will be too much for a slow workday.? I’ve never written an entry about blowing off work, so here we go.?
12a – Settling down after a nerve-wracking Game 6 in the playoffs. I am elated that we didn’t lose! S turns on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy – she’s going back through that series again and she’s maybe 3 seasons into it. This episode is something about a guy who saws his foot off with a chainsaw. It’s been a long time since dinner, and she is snacky – she doordashes a midnight snack, and I look through the losing team’s social media comments – realizing I don’t really feel like being a troll (I don’t find that sort of thing fun anymore) but also loving their tears.
1:15a – I couldn’t stay awake anymore, so we headed to bed. S has insomnia, so she agrees to go lay down whenever I do, and she tries to get to sleep then. I put on a Halloween-ish episode of our sleep meditation podcast, and I remember none of it. It was a long, 6+ hour one. I think I remember waking up enough to catch something about someone being lost in a hall of mirrors, right as the sun was rising. I really hope she was able to pass out relatively quickly.?
7:30a – I wake up and remember I am off today – yesssssssssss. It’s nice and cool in here with the heat off. S wakes up halfway and tells me she called in to work herself. How sweet! As my supervisor says – PTO is there to be used and a mental health day is a completely valid use of sick time. We snuggle some, then I need to get up and sit upright for a while. My back’s not bad but laying there too long makes it stiff and a little grumpy.?
8:15a – I tell S we can go for “donuts or something” (our code for breakfast) when she wakes up; she really seemed to enjoy that idea.? I come out to the living room to catch up on last night’s win, and around 9 I start the French press. Good Lord tonight is going to be a nightmare – Game 7 gets no bigger – after tonight they will either be in the World Series, or are eliminated and start an immediate 4-month vacation. Going to be sick with nerves all day. Man, I need a passport so I can be in the right city for this. I check in on S and she’s asleep! Good for her – I’ll see her when she wakes up. I grab my pink Jason Voorhees mug and wait for the coffee – I feel a little bit bad that I didn’t stay in bed longer while she was dozing back off but my back is stupid. I’ll be nicer to her as the day goes on! I open the back patio door and let all of the fall in – orange leafy breeze, birds. I remember a couple of weeks ago, S’s sister came over for the first time, and she later said our place was uncomfortably quiet and cozy; she wasn’t used to that in her household with 4 loud kids. I wouldn’t change this for anything.?
9:30a – It’s October so I’m doing my “31 Days of Horror” movie thing. 1 new-to-me movie every day all month. I look around a little and settle on Hellraiser III – this year’s 31 Days is all sequels/prequels/remakes/etc. This will take me to about 11, at which time I anticipate S will be waking up. Outside our open patio door I hear cars passing by, down the road that runs behind our neighborhood, and I feel a little bit bad for people having to go about a regular Monday – couldn’t be me! Anyway, the cenobites are flaying someone.?
10:00a – Her alarm goes off. She’s trying to wake up? The snooze goes off every 9 minutes until 10:45, when I go check on her. She’s slowly coming around. Sciatica makes it really hard for her to get moving in the morning. I go back and finish the movie while logging in to do a couple of quick work things…approving timecards and whatnot. I discovered that my boss has taken the whole week off. Like I said, the workplace is dead this week.?
11:15a – I check in again, and she’s passed out. She turned her alarm off. I don’t know whether to wake her up (since she was really looking forward to spending an impromptu day off with me) or let her keep going; she obviously didn’t sleep that much overnight. I let her be. It’s cold in here now, so I close the back door, and turn on the heater a little. I unload and reload the dishwasher; I’ll start it later, whenever we leave out. I am so glad she finally made a doctor appointment to see about her leg…she can’t keep living in pain as she’s been doing these last couple of months.?
12:15-4p – She lives! We got ready and headed out to lunch by 1. We decide to take a skip-day trip to Daleville and be classy – doing a very late breakfast at Waffle House. It’s kind of our joke-but-not-a-joke go-to place for food when we are on our way to go do something down towards Indy. Grits sounded good anyway. Given it was a Monday, it wasn’t busy, and we took seats in the back corner. While watching our food cook, I listen to a server alerting all her coworkers that the customer she just finished with was super-hot. They then talked amongst each other about how the “new girl” (our server) is faring at waiting tables. The consensus was that she is fine but not great, but very good after only being on the job for 2 hours now. While we were eating pecan waffles, S mentioned the idea of going and looking for a new shelf, to be put in our spare bedroom. Right now, that room is just a litter box room-slash-containment area for excess random junk we have; we would like to turn the room into an office/library/study kind of thing. I would love to help with this, and offer to buy something along those lines. I suggested that she look for a shelf that she likes. The huge issue we have with our place is the utter lack of storage space; I’d love it if we could stop paying $50/month for the (tiny) storage unit we got when she started her job, and needed space for all her work-from-home materials. Initially her job was paying for that, but when her position changed, and she became under control of her organization’s parent company, they stopped paying for it. I wonder then if she can write off the monthly rental as a business expense? Anyway, we go back and forth about going to look at Ikea. But I started feeling guilty for her leg and maybe didn’t want her to have to walk around that much. She said that I baby her too much and things aren’t as bad as what I think, regarding her well-being. I rather doubt that, but I am not one to dictate what someone else does. She suggested she is up for whatever I wanted to do, and I decided to split the difference between shopping and giving her leg a break – we went to Target. There, we took our usual, leisurely, lap around the store. We saw a friend from our book club there. In the end we grabbed just a couple of things, but their shelving options were limited. I guess that will wait till another day. We then go to Payless, for apples and puff pastry – S wants to make appelflaps shaped and decorated like baseballs for the game tonight. I think that’s just adorable. She is always trying to make my day that much better; I only hope she could say that I do the same for her. I try!!
4p – We got back home around 4, and there wasn’t really any kind of plan as to what else to do with the afternoon. S checked the mail, and her Ancestry DNA package had arrived. She is really looking forward to submitting it, to see how German or not she is. (With the recent Ancestry DNA update, I am now shown to be 1% “North African” …so she jokes with me that I am now a lot more interesting!) She put the kit aside and went into the back to relax; I could hear Facebook Reels videos playing, so she was fine, as much as she can with her leg being the jerk that it is. I thought I’d try to be somewhat productive, so I called to make a payment at my doctor’s office, but I was on hold for 15 minutes, so I gave up. I would have just done it online, but their payment page is terrible. Then I crashed. I don’t know why I became so exhausted all of a sudden, but I found myself laying there, overflowing the love seat, missing 10-45 seconds of consciousness at the time. S came out and found me that way and decided it’s time for a nap. I guess having an afternoon nap is the epitome of playing hooky from work. I can’t usually sleep when the sun is up, but she closed the blinds and curtains in the bedroom and made everything comfy in there. She turned on a white noise thing. Sure enough I passed out for a half hour. With her still snoozing, I got up and started my descent into anxiety over the upcoming baseball game – consisting of Youtube videos where baseball analysts put in their two cents. When she woke up and joined me, we ordered food. She learned that today is National Mozzarella Stick Day, and she really went with that…deciding on a local fast-food place that had them. Then, we settled in for a long night of the kind of stress that only watching your favorite team on the cusp of elimination can conjure.?
8p-11p – Game 7 – My team hasn’t made the World Series in 32 years, which is longer than so many people around have been alive. This has made me feel old lately, because I vividly remember watching those teams as a teenager in 1992-1993. Everybody around me, and the national sports media hated them, because they weren’t in a US market. There have been so many seasons where I got used to them finishing 3rd in their division. Every season at the end of spring training, I only ever hope for them to finish at least 3rd, and mayyyybe shoot to sneak into the back door of the playoffs. Occasionally they would improve to finishing 2nd, and then there were those weird couple of years in the mid ‘10s where they were very good, and almost made it, but for the Cleveland Indians or the Kansas City Royals, respectively. Last year was terrible, finishing last in the division. But this season has felt different. It feels like any hole or deficit they face; they just climb out of it. They were supposed to wilt against the Yankees, and instead they curb-stomped them. They were then supposed to get hit all over by the surprise home run champion in Seattle, and instead they rendered him irrelevant. Now they stand just 27 short outs away from joining the Dodgers in the World Series. Who knows if I will ever see this again in my life. They play in the toughest division in the league, and there’s always 1-3 of those teams who are that season’s powerhouse. S starts in the kitchen baking the appelflaps – she has gotten into this team quite a bit in her 3 years with me; I find it adorable and love helping her learn things about the game and team. She has her favorite players, her least favorite, and you can tell she is picking up on the finer points of the rules, when she gets annoyed or happy at the correct times during a game. Sometimes I feel a little bit guilty for “changing her” …she never would have been interested in this before…but it seems like a genuine interest, so I must tell myself that it’s ok to let someone take interest in your interests. Anyway, the game gets going and it starts off well enough – our starting pitcher, Shane Bieber, is shaky, but not giving up a ton of hits. The issue is our offense; they have a tendency sometimes to hit a lot of balls directly to opposition fielders. Lots of easy outs. When they win, they usually win big, but when they lose it’s agonizing because everything seems like it’s only 2 inches from having been amazing. There is a lot of that going on in the first 4 innings and a sense of dread washes over me. She can hear the game from the kitchen and is rushing to join me as soon as the baking is done. I guess she had planned to bake earlier but she accidentally fell asleep with me a couple hours ago. Seattle gets out to a 3-1 lead and it’s pretty clear this is the end of the road. Our bullpen can be unhittable but can also suck hard. You never know which you will get, and with Shane only going 3 ? innings, the chances of catastrophe are high. But our coaches are smart, they know they have 2 starters ready to go in a game where there might be no tomorrow. They brought in 1 of them, Gausman, for an inning to shut down Seattle. Then came the 7th inning. It is a core memory now. Seattle took out their best pitcher, Bryan Woo, and replaced him with a reliever that looked genuinely scared of the moment – to face our DH George Springer who, 2 games earlier, got kneecapped with a 97-mph fastball. I had been worried that he could even stand. But with runners at 2nd and 3rd, on a 1-0 sinker that didn’t sink, he popped a mammoth home run that made the entire stadium rise off the ground about 3 inches. After ? of a game of nothing, we are suddenly winning 4-3! In the coming days you will readily find replays of the home run, but I was sad that S was indisposed right at that moment and didn’t see it live. So, with 6 outs left, they turned to another starter, Bassitt, who mowed down Seattle. All that’s left now was bringing in their closer, Hoffman, and 3 strikeouts later, they did it! My reaction was really quiet. I was kind of stunned. This could not have just happened! I kind of just leaned over into S’s arms and cried for a minute. After so long – decades of hope and having your heart torn out, it happened. Watching it on TV in Indiana should not have been the way to go. The moment deserved better. The game ended right at 11.?
11p – The last hour of the day is spent reveling in the moment with S. The postgame commentary (she realizes she is now a fan of David Ortiz). The appelflaps. The World Series t-shirt she ordered for me. The look ahead to this next week of tremendous hope. I felt like this moment was a microcosm of our lives going into this next year and into the larger future. Hope, plans, strategy, going against people that see your failure as part of their success. Dedication to working together to make it through. I debated sending my brother, who lives in Seattle, a message – a good-natured ribbing, but decided against it, because he isn’t really into the Mariners like that. Indeed, no one around me gives much of a shit about baseball, and certainly not about the Toronto Blue Jays, so it’s tough to be the only guy in town jumping up and down about something. This moment of victory – it’s kind of just for the two of us here, then. My other friends don’t care about this team or baseball or sports in general. I’m sure that anyone reading this won’t care. I’m in the wrong place for that, I guess. That’s kind of been my story…having weird interests, passions, and attachments that don’t align with the people around me. Midnight hits, and just like that, as we celebrate a small part of our lives going very very well, being very closely connected to a place not near here, my Everyday Life in Middletown experience ends. But my today was definitely not everyday life in Muncie. I don’t feel like any day of mine ever is.?
…we are up until about 2.?