Afternoon-Evening Routine

On Saturday, I posted here about how I'm spending my mornings in these Viral Days. And I got a note from a former student who asked about the afternoons. So ... you can blame her for this one!

Here's a shocker: Joyce and I eat lunch about noon. Our menus are not too much alike. She loves salads (I eat but do not crave them), makes soup (this week it's potato), sometimes has a bagel (with some restrained gobs of JIF crunchy), some yogurt;

I have basically the same thing I've eaten for lunch for, oh, about forty years. Lowfat vanilla yogurt with sliced fruit, a slice of homemade sourdough bread with some fruit preserves (this week it's blackberry from Szalay's Farm Market), 8 oz of pomegranate juice, a little flavored bubbly water.

We sit at a little table in our family room and (as Petruchio says at Bianca's wedding near the end of The Taming of the Shrew), "Nothing but sit and sit and eat and eat" (5.2).  But we also talk and talk. A lot.

After lunch, we separate: She goes upstairs to read and write (she's currently reading James McBride's new one, Deacon King Kong).

I go to Venue 2 (Venue 1 is our family room), our living room in the front of the house--complete with (gas) fireplace, which I occasionally use (not recently). I settle onto the couch and, yesterday, I did the following (my general pattern every day):

• read the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon-Journal on my iPad
• wrote a silly poem about the sin of pride for my Daily Doggerel blog
• read 25 pp of a recently published novel by Claude McKay (1889-1948), an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance (the novel, Romance in Marseille [sic], had lain, unpublished till now, in the New York Public Library).
• posted on Facebook a silly poem I'd written the other day, "The Dingo That Loved Bingo"
• started an advanced reading copy of the new title I'm reviewing for Kirkus Reviews this week--not allowed to tell you what it is
• wrote a draft of another silly one, "An Emu Goes Cuckoo," which I'll post in a few days
• worked on final revisions for the birthday story Joyce and I have written for grandson Carson, who turns 11 on April 3 (we have written stories for both grandsons, starting at their 2nd birthday, I think); the older one, Logan, just turned fifteen
• I caught up on email and Facebook
• about 2:30 I quit working, and Joyce and I went for a walk of about a mile around our neighborhood (widely avoiding other walkers)
• home: I sprinted for bed and slept about an hour (my daily custom)
• awake, I fussed with my computer and shut it down for the night
• dinner prep (last night we shared a small piece of salmon + mixed rice + carrots and green beans + some sourdough bread); I also had--as I do every night--a medium banana and an apple.
• while eating, we watched some of an older Late Night with Seth Meyers; one guest was James Taylor, who sang "Teach Me Tonight"--it had both of us wiping our eyes
• we'd met Taylor once, years ago, at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass.; my older brother was then covering the Boston Symphony for the Boston Globe; Tanglewood is the Blossom of Mass.!
• after cleaning up we headed upstairs to read; my read-in-bed books total eight now (3 are on Kindle): a Wilkie Collins (Heart and Science), Little Women, Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (her conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy), The Black Wave (a book of history about turmoil in the Middle East), The Stories of Alice Adams (almost done with it!); on Kindle, it's the new one by Lee Child , Blue Moon; another one by Val McDermid (whose works about Tony Hill/Carol Jordan I'm reading in order), The Torment of Others; an earlier one by Ken Bruen (A White Arrest)
• I try to read about 10 pp in each during this bedtime reading-time
• Joyce joins me in bed about 7, and we stream about an hour--pieces of the shows we like
• Lights Out between 8-8:30 (I know: I'm an Old Guy)

And the next morning, we begin again ...

Whew .. I'm tired just typing all of this--and a bit bored. Imagine how you must feel if you managed to read all of this!