Making Adjustments

As a creature of habit, I like to do things a certain way. In the mornings, I get up, get my coffee, eat, edit, workout, eat again, write, read a bit, then cook dinner before the hubs gets home.

My system is down pact to allow for the most productivity possible since I’m my own boss. I have deadlines for things, but how I go about making those deadlines is completely up to me. If I don’t have some kind of structure or that structure is impeded in some way, my whole day is shot.

There’s been A LOT of impeding happening lately, mainly from the hubs who’s been laid off for the past month.

We’ve been together for eleven years, but it’s been kind of like getting reintroduced to each other. The man makes so much noise. So. Much. Noise. It’s really hard to get editing or writing done when my office is right off the living room and he watches more TV than any person I’ve ever known. That’s not entirely fair; it’s more like his must have background noise.

You know the kind of background noise I prefer?

Silence.

It’s really hard to work out how to change a paragraph so it sounds right when I’ve got snippets of 30 Rock dialogue breaking my concentration.

My cleaning schedule has gone to crap since I’m working with twice the mess and we operate on two different understandings of the word cleanly. He spills something while making breakfast, and he’ll eat breakfast before cleaning it up, sometimes forgetting about it all together, while I’m sitting there with an eye twitch at the splash of milk fermenting on the counter.

I also have a big irritation when it comes to just sitting around. It’s really not fair to him since he doesn’t have as much stuff to do as me now that he’s not working. And he has worked 40+ hours a week for as far back as forever and deserves to relax a whole day away sometimes, but it gets right under my skin when I have so much to do and he’s taking a nap.

The first week was tough as we relearned how to work around each other’s systems. It was like moving in together again, only I wasn’t 17 and willing to budge on everything and neither was he.

We had to break the tension a bit. So we went to the dollar store and got some Nerf guns. Nothing is quite as satisfying as being able to peg the source of your irritation with a friendly foam dart.

It’s been good now. Adjustments have begrudgingly been made, and I think we’ve both gotten used to being in each other’s space a bit more.

Change happens at anytime, and it’s nice to know that even after eleven years, we’re still willing to adjust for each other.