Cats and Mice

Yesterday I finished yet another alphabet book page.  M is for Mice.  I'm not sure I like this one as much because two mice have to make the letter M.  I tried what felt like a bazillion ways to make just one mouse look like an m, but I just couldn't do it (well, can't is a strong word- I could have done it but it would have looked stupid (pardon my use of the "s" word)).

You might wonder what else I do with my days here besides working on alphabet book pages.  You may also wonder why it is that I post only one alphabet page every other day or so.  What is it I do here??

I have realized that a good part of my day

(after...

-walking 77 miles to the gym and working out amidst smelly Germans, all over the age of 68 who want to be my friend but who I can only understand, at best, 50% of the time

-walking back those 77 miles - and its uphill both ways

-buying groceries - often at two or more stores since the store I buy my cheap vegetables at doesn't carry edible meat and/or toothpaste and would never have advil because it's a dangerous drug and you need to ask at the counter at the pharmacy for it so they can see you're over 18 and won't abuse it...

-cleaning the house, which takes approximately 4 times as long as it might in the US due to inferior cleaning products

-and making dinner - again, 4 times as long because I have to churn the butter, grow the herbs and make any sort of sauce, breadcrumb, or other typically pre-packaged food myself... 

only to find that by the time I've completed my daily tasks, Bob has been home for half an hour, already messed up my cleaning, has finished the dinner it took hours to prepare and is waiting for me to finish washing the dishes so we can relax because he's been working all day**)

is spent being a chair.

Yeah, that thing that looks like a zipper is my sweatshirt, and yes the cat is on my lap, which for all intensive purposes is a chair.  My cat also likes to sleep on unoccupied chairs.  Just not as much.

Fortunately, while being a chair, I can do other useful things, like surf the web or edit photos or scan alphabet book pages, or write blog posts... which is what I'm doing now while being a chair.  Fantastic.

**For the sake of emphasizing my point I may have slightly over exaggerated a few details.  The gym is NOT 77 miles away, its only 1.  And Bob is actually a very nice guy who picks up things I forget at the store on his way home from work, sometimes helps make dinner and almost half the time puts away the dishes after I wash them.  He also knows that being a hausfrau is a full time, demanding, tiring and often times boring job and if he ever mentions that it isn't work, isn't as hard as the work he does, doesn't take as much time and effort as I say it does, or any other comments that even suggest being a hausfrau is not a full-time laborious job, I will get on the first plane out of here and go home to my mom.  Hasn't happened yet...
Oh, and he's not that messy.