Not more than five minutes ago ─ or around 5:30 p.m. ─ my wife and two stepsons left for a supper somewhere in recognition of the youngest lad's 23rd birthday six days ago.
My wife invited me. However, she did so around 3:00 p.m. while I was having my first meal of the day. I'm 71 years old ─ I cannot have an actual restaurant meal following so close upon the heels of a previous meal. I needed to know about this well before; but as so often happens, I only learn of it before I can prepare ahead for the outing.
And so I had to decline.
My wife knows that I am like this, yet it still never occurred to her to give me the 'heads up' whenever it was that the three were making this planned outing. Really, I am an afterthought, I suppose; I oughtn't to feel any guilt for the declination, but there is some anyway.
Not a half hour before they left, I finally finished getting our Christmas lights set up. We have outdoor lights that are kept up year round, but others are not stationed such that this is possible. Thus, each year they must be taken down; and then the setup happens all over again the following year, as it did this afternoon.
My younger brother is Grinch-like, so my concession to him is that I don't light us up until December 1st, and that is why I got busy with the activity this afternoon. My youngest stepson had been out, and came back home near the end of my chore, so he lent a hand for a time. While doing so, he asked if I was coming with them for that meal, so I explained why I was not.
I think they have 6 p.m. reservations, and he cited that time as a potential opening for me where concerned my appetite, but I stressed that I wasn't his brawny older brother who dines numerous times a day to maintain a high count of total daily protein grammes.
I only have two meals a day, and my next one will not be until after 7 p.m. ─ but it will be very nominal. It won't be much more than a snack.
I have to drop this topic ─ it keeps my sense of guilt active.
I will be getting to bed early this evening, so I will possibly be rising during the midnight hour or soon thereafter. The weest a.m. is when I usually manage to accomplish most of the work that I get done here at my computer. This is going to be my first opportunity to light us up ─ even though no one else may be up from bed to witness it all.
When I rose in the early a.m. last night, I never did get a chance to work on any of my projects. I owed a response to an E-mail from a chap with whom I have been sharing E-mail discussions of our mutual appreciation that there is no COVID-19 pandemic, and all of the restrictions such as lockdowns and mandated face masks have more sinister implications that have nothing whatsoever to do with a fictionally rampant virus.
That response of mine took me around two hours. And because I owed a former co-worker a reply on an entirely different set of topics, I lost another hour or so. It was at least 4:30 a.m. when I got back to bed ─ it may even have been after 5 a.m., now that I consider it. Yet by 8 a.m., I was again awake and anxious to get up to at least get a little done of what I had meant to do overnight.
My younger brother was not yet up, be he soon enough was. I had a video that I wanted to watch with him soon after 10 a.m.
However, before I get into that, I want to mention that last evening he arrived home barely after 7 p.m. from wherever he had been drinking. I was watching an episode of one of the T.V. series I follow, and normally I would have cancelled out of the programme and escaped to the upstairs to avoid him.
But it was sufficiently early last evening ─ too early for me to be going to bed ─ that I decided to chance his condition and perhaps watch at least a couple episodes of T.V. series we follow in common.
When my show ended, we watched some NFL football for a bit. He helped himself to some of my wife's cooking, and then he invited me to tune in something else to watch (I am the only one of us who knows how to operate our Android TV Box).
I have grown to not trust my brother's ability to retain his senses anymore when it comes to watching our shows in the evening, and it is primarily because I now avoid his company that I retire early.
And so as I said, I decided to gamble on him. Not too much after 8 p.m., I tuned in an episode of one of our shows.
What do you think happened? Why, not five minutes into the show, his eyes were already closed and his chin dropping.
Fed up, but in control of myself, I backed out of the episode, which roused him once more. But I forestalled any word from him by just calmly saying, "We'll watch this some other time."
He knew he had been found out. And what he had gone and done is reinforce the practice now that is becoming my evening norm ─ avoid any attempt to watch T.V. with him. Instead, he is best left to sit and drink by himself as he watches whatever he wants all alone.
It is his choice to drink himself to the point where he can no longer retain a grasp upon full consciousness. I have no reason to feel guilt, yet quite often some twinges of it are there.
Anyway, back to this morning. The video I wanted us to watch was a Corbett Report titled Your Guide to the Great Reset.
It was around 70 minutes in length; but although my brother did patiently watch it for nigh an hour, by then he could not help but ask how much longer it was. His interest had been played out.
To be honest, mine pretty much had, too. The presentation seemed too much of the same thing ─ just rephrased. Make no mistake ─ I'm a believer. But this specific episode never really flew very far.
I just hope my brother hasn't started feeling negative about this sort of fare ─ I am planning on tuning in this material quite regularly in the latter mornings during the workweek.
The hour of 7 p.m. is here, and my wife and her two sons could be returning at any point. I would like to have that snack of a supper all set to go and maybe even eaten before the diners arrive back here, so I am going to close shop here for this post.
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