Nothing makes me happier than coming home at the end of a hard day and seeing my wife and daughter. We really have a lot of fun together.<\/p>\n
But when I get a chance to have the house all to myself for three days, I’m not going to turn that down.<\/p>\n
Maria and Bridget went to visit some friends last week, leaving me to my own devices.<\/p>\n
Their visit took place during the middle of the week, which meant I had to use my secondary system of solo survival. I wanted to take some time off work, but I had a day off at the end of the week to go away with Maria and two co-workers already had off. I couldn’t afford to \u201cget sick.\u201d<\/p>\n
That meant I had to pack all my fun into just a few hours each night. Luckily, I have a few time-saving devices which guarantee that I don’t lose any valuable time and can watch as much TV and play as many video games as I want.<\/p>\n
First off, I don’t make the bed. This might sound simplistic to some people, but when I only have 12-13 hours at home and need to get at least six or seven hours of sleep each night, every second counts.<\/p>\n
If I made the bed, I would lose about two or three minutes of sleep each morning. That’s close to 10 minutes of my temporary bachelorhood. I can’t cut into my time playing the Wii with bed making.<\/p>\n
My second strategy involves the dishes. Basically, I wait until the absolute last minute to do the dishes. With only one person, there is no way I will go through everything in our kitchen. So why bother cleaning up unless I have to?<\/p>\n
I typically washes the dishes every night during the week. I don’t have as many to do when I’m home alone so just knock them out in one session on my last night alone. That saves precious time.<\/p>\n
I wrap up my good use of time by cooking almost all my meals on the grill. This serves a few purposes for me.<\/p>\n
When I cook outside, I don’t need a lot of time to prepare my meal. Once I bring my stuff home from the grocery store, I just need to fire up the grill and slap the chicken or sausage or whatever on the flames.<\/p>\n
Using the grill for dinner also gives me the opportunity to cook up a whole mess of food for future meals. In the two nights I cooked last week, I made enough for more than two weeks worth of lunches. That comes in handy.<\/p>\n
But the best part of grilling alone is that I can stand outside and calmly enjoy a beer before tearing into a piece of charred meat while watching TV and not worrying about whether I have barbecue sauce on my face.<\/p>\n
Moments like that make my stress melt away. That is until I have to do the dishes and make the bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nothing makes me happier than coming home at the end of a hard day and seeing my wife and daughter. We really have a lot of fun together. But when I get a chance to have the house all to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-family","wpcat-3-id","wpcat-16-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1059,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/1059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}