Ah, the weekend
Over my lifetime, I've rarely looked forward to weekends for a variety of reasons, but during the first three or four years of my relationship with Rob I considered weekends to be a very cool thing. Rob and I would go camping or have the guys in the band over for a day-long jam session or throw a party or do some other sort of fun thing. Then the work, family and neighborhood situation gradually changed and we stopped doing those things. The initial nail in the coffin was when the cops started showing up at the first sound of a bar chord. I never figured out which neighbors (if any) were complaining since all the folks around us were totally cool with the jam sessions or parties and usually came over to join in the fun. Personally, I think it was just the cops driving by, hearing the music and deciding to break it up based on the shitty council's preoccupation with noise ordinances. We contemplated buying a decibel meter to prove that it wasn't that loud until we discovered we needed a special permit to play amplified music in our backyard. We then switched to acoustic guitars and STILL the cops came out. Apparently there's a limit to the number of people you can have in your backyard or something like that.

At some point, I started working at jobs where I no longer had weekends totally free, Kyle turned into a teenager and some other stuff happened that left us with without the extra energy needed to pull off a camping trip or do anything but turn into couch potatoes on the weekends. That became the routine which turned into a habit and we continued to be stuck in that rut even after the kid grew up and I was laid off from my job. You would think I could have mustered the energy to come up with something fun to do on a weekend. Then again, there was the stress of not being able to find a new job, the struggle to keep a roof over our head and food on the table and the depression that resulted from finding myself suddenly "unemployable". Not exactly a formula for fun times.

Those days have passed and I have a new job. Yesterday, after being at work from seven in the morning to seven at night on three of those days, I found myself really looking forward to the weekend. Unfortunately, it wasn't because we had something "fun" planned. It was only because it meant that I didn't have to get out of bed at 4:30 in the morning and I might actually get some housework and laundry done. Not exactly the best reasons to look forward to a weekend. I found myself longing for the old days when weekends had a bigger purpose than just sleeping late and cleaning house. How did we pull that off?

I do remember that we had dinner at a restaurant every night and so there was very little grocery shopping and dish washing. We were also both done with work and commute by 5:15 or so and went to bed around 11:30 which gave us a good six hours every weeknight. We don't have that kind of time in the evenings now. We also had two dogs that didn't require much attention instead of three that require a bit more interaction. Plus we weren't quite the complete slobs then that we are now and I think we were much better at maintaining some semblance of order around the house during the week.

I can't do much about the time factor right now and eating out every night would not only wreck the budget, but would also prevent being at the house where I can do a load of laundry while I spend time with the dogs. Perhaps we can motivate ourselves to cook and clean during the week if we have a "fun stuff" carrot hanging in front of our noses. The trick is going to be coming up with things to do that are enticing enough to prevent us from saying "Ah, fuck it" on the weeknights. Right now, I can't think of anything that would provide the proper motivation. It seems that somewhere along the line, I've forgotten how to have fun.