Jim is away for a few days working at the neighbor’s again, which is pretty close to being at camp. The Monitor Valley ranch, owned by the same company as the RO, is more remote than a lot of camps. It is accessible only by many miles of dirt road, with no cell phone service and landlines that work only when the weather is good. He took a bed roll and is staying in the bunkhouse with two single guys, a hot water heater that doesn’t work, and a vat of ground beef and fried potatoes, so I basically consider it camping.
Here are a few things I’ve discovered a wife can do to fill her time while batching it for a few days.
1) Look forward to his phone call in the evening. If it’s not raining or stormy, that is.
2) Cut up his ripped shirts and two pillowcases you don’t like and make a rag rug for the new baby’s room.
3) Put the rug in the baby’s room and decide you don’t like how the colors coordinate with the rest of the decor.
4) Move the rug to your room.
5) Half an hour later decide you REALLY don’t like the way it looks there, so relocate the rug to the guest room.
6) Realize you rarely have house guests, and a guest room that is actually a bed roll/spare tack storage room doesn’t really need a hand-crocheted rag rug, so move the rug back to the baby’s room.
7) Decide the colors are perfect, and leave the rug in its originally intended location.
Here is the well-traveled rug.
8) Settle in on the couch in the evening to watch all your shows that you’re not able to watch while taking care of a toddler and cooking and cleaning for a family, then realize you don’t have any shows.
9) Get over the disappointment of not having any shows, watch two reruns of Friends, and go to bed.
10) Eat oatmeal for dinner, because your husband isn’t around to make fun of you. Hey, I really like oatmeal.
11) Tell your toddler daughter “Daddy’s still at work, honey. He won’t be home for a couple more days,” several times a day when she hears a truck engine drive by outside and asks if it’s Daddy.
12) Eat too many dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses. Oh, wait, I do that when Jim’s here, too. Nevermind.
13) Sleep on his side of the bed so I don’t have to lay on my side and feel the emptiness next to me.
14) Make one small cup of coffee in the mornings instead of a whole pot. Such a lonely little cup.
15) Make a duffel bag out of your husband’s ripped jeans and a pillowcase.
The inside is lined with leopard-print (or is this cheetah?) as well. Super cute.
16) Realize you have upcycled all the ripped clothes in the house, and hope your husband returns home soon to defend his intact garments. A bored seamstress far away from a fabric store can be a dangerous thing.
17) Take your toddler outside and teach her to identify different types of animal droppings by species in sign language. This isn’t quite as out-there as it sounds; she doesn’t talk yet, so we use signs for everything. I still harbor unfulfilled dreams of being a first-class, Grade-A tracker, the kind who can tell you the color of a person’s vest by looking at half of their tennis shoe track in a mud hole, so I’m encouraged by Grace’s interest in studying animal sign. Maybe she’ll be the family tracker, and I can just keep eating dark chocolate and making rag rugs.
18) Wonder if he would care/notice if you dyed your hair bright pink. Decide to paint your toenails instead.
19) Wash the dishes at least once.
20) Make a list of all the things you can do while your husband is away at camp.
