Home Sweet Sarah

There are 168 hours in a week. I didn’t know that — I could easily have figured it out, but, eh — but Holly wrote this post yesterday and I thought I’d follow suit. In case you haven’t noticed, I always do what Holly says. Chicken thighs. Blog posts. What have you. She’s a smart lady.

The question is, how do you spend your 168? Here’s how mine break down:

Right off the bat, I sleep for about 63 hours a week.

105 hours left. Not too shabby. What else?

If I’m feeling really ambitious, I wake up early and I go running. I try to do this three times a week. Lately I’ve been adding a yoga class into the mix. Factoring in drive-time or put-on-my-running-shoes-time, I’d say I workout about 4 hours a week. (Hey, that’s not too bad!) (That’s also not too good.)

101 hours to go.

After I workout, or whenever I wake up, I have to immediately start getting ready. Last week I thought I’d sit around luxuriously, drinking my coffee in bed. That resulted in me knocking my full cup of coffee over. Over everything, I should say. And I hadn’t even had one sip, you guys. NOT EVEN ONE SIP. I spent a long time cleaning that morning, but that’s abnormal, so I’m not going to count it.

To get ready, it sort of depends on what I’m doing. Am I washing my hair? (Every other day.) Am I even bothering to shower? (Usually, although not this morning.) Do I know what I’m wearing already? (Hit or miss.)

No matter, it usually takes about an hour from when I start getting ready until I leave the house. Chris gets LG ready most of the time (he also brings me my coffee (in bed, all the better to knock it over)) and that helps cut my getting ready time down. Despite that, LG poops every single morning before we leave. Of course she does. Anyway, I spend 6 hours a week getting ready (considering I rarely “get ready” on the weekends, I do usually shower, so I’m counting Saturday and Sunday as half-time.)

95 hours! There’s still a lot left!

Now here’s where a big chunk of my time is spent (and truth be told, I’m a little scared to see this number): DRIVING. From the time I leave the house, drop LG off, drive to work, park, walk across the street and up the stairs to my office, and sit down, it’s been an hour and a half. That’s…7.5 hours a week. DAMN.

87.5! Still not bad.

At work, I do all the work-y things everyone else does. I check my email and respond accordingly. I make lists. I cross things off of lists. I pull my hair out. I talk on the phone. I write a lot of things. I work in this fashion for three hours every morning before high-tailing it outside for some lunch, Vitamin D, and a book. 15 hours a week working in the mornings.

72.5 hours to go.

Minus 5 for lunch.

67.5 hours to go.

In the afternoons, I do the same as above. Once in awhile, I attend a meeting or event. Sometimes I take a walk, trolling for stray newspapers (more on this later.) 20 more hours of work.

47.5 hours remain. Work takes up a lot of time, GOD.

Once the workday is done and I flee the scene like Lindsay Lohan with someone else’s coke in her back pocket (j/k Lindz, I don’t know if you’ve ever fled the scene of a crime), I have to drive home. This takes less time, since I am not on LG-wrangling duty in the evenings. From the time I do all of the above, but in reverse, it’s an hour. Times five days a week? 5 hours of driving in the afternoons.

42.5 hours down!

After I get home, I walk to the door slowly and deliberately and assess the situation from the outside. Can I hear loud screams of discontent? (Yes.) Should I just go inside anyway? (Usually.) Depending on her mood — and I mean MOOD — we spend anywhere from five minutes to one hour hanging out with LG, while also prepping dinner/drinking wine/talking about which idiots we dealt with that day/looking at the garden/etc. I’m counting this at 5.5 hours a week, because I’m sick of typing .5s everywhere.

37 hours to go!

After we shut LG down, Chris and I eat, watch the tube, clean up dinner, prepare the next day’s lunches, and watch more TV. I also spend this time working on my beloved puzzles (see above re: newspapers, the trolling of.) I have crosswords, cryptoquotes, jumbles, sodokus, what have you. Sometimes we play cards. (Meant to do that last night and didn’t.) Sometimes we watch a movie. (Last night we watched two — I Know What You Did Last Summer and Overboard. That resulted in a dream about Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, by the way.) We spend about two hours a night doing this, so that’s 10 hours of weekly hang-out time.

27 hours remain!

The rest of this time is weekend time, which is hard to break down. Costco, the farm stand, the grocery store? Maybe 3 hours. Brunch, BBQ-ing, snacking on cheese in front of an open fridge because we forgot to eat? Let’s say 5 hours. Yard work, gardening, laundry? Oh, 4 hours or so. So, 12 hours later…

15 hours are left. We’re wrapping up!

We spend the rest of this time outside, talking, drinking wine on the patio, etc. We run random errands — to the pharmacy or Target — but sometimes we actually do fun things, like hang out with friends or go to Napa. I also — no shame in my game — spend some time catching up with my Real Housewives.

There you have it! How do you spend your week?