Welcome to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes and lives? Every month a group of six bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, thoughts, and more!

Today we’re doing the second installment of our Day in the Life series: Weekends.

And man, do I wish we could have done this one several years ago when weekends were FUN!!!

Weekends used to be about trips into the city to museums and galleries and parks with friends…and lunch…and coffee…and second lunch and second coffee…and pleading to The Parking Angel and getting lost and laughing about it. Or leisurely brunches with nowhere else to go after and just talking and talking. Or drives out east to beautiful gardens. Drives upstate in the fall to see the changing foliage. Laying on the sofa all afternoon reading. Sleeping late with no obligations scheduled.

Boy, that all looked like fun. You remember fun, don’tcha?? You’re supposed to ENJOY IT.

Now weekends are about To Do lists. Studying. Homework. Lesson plans. Listing on ebay. Trapped inside my prison of piles: boxes, laundry, dirty dishes, things to be photographed, things to be listed, things to be packed and shipped, things to be gone through and sorted.

Wow, this sounds like One Woman’s Spiral Downwards into Depression. But really, it’s climbing up and out. My weekends these days are spent building a foundation to support me later on. This isn’t the good part. This is how we get to the good part.

But WOW am I tired. I’m older than I’ve ever been. Tireder than I’ve ever been. I just want to lay down and close my eyes. Sigh. I guess there’s a hole in the ground somewhere with my name on it for that. Til then, it’s Just Keep Going.

All that said, here’s what a typical current weekend looks like:

Saturday: DO ALL THE STUFF. Ha. I really really try to get the bulk of things on the list done on Saturday so I can take it a little easier on Sunday.

What’s The Stuff? Opening boxes and closets and pulling out stuff. Sorting it. What will I sell/donate/give away/throw away? Looking things up on ebay to see if they’re worth my time and effort to list. If they’re not, they go in a box earmarked for donations or in the trash. If they are, they get washed/cleaned/prepped as needed for photographing. Then whatever’s ready to be photographed gets stacked by the “photo studio,” aka a 1940’s enamel top kitchen table that now lives in my bedroom against a cream-colored wall. I drag over the broken desk chair and start taking pictures, then items gets restacked in the “office,” a 1950’s vanity turned computer desk next to the scanner and postage scale. After pictures I start editing. When I used to really DO do ebay, I’d do a different task each day…gather all the things one day, take all the pictures the next day, edit all the pictures the day after that, then write up listings and schedule auctions the last day. But I find it works better for me now if, after editing A Blue Widget’s pictures, I list that one item. So I edit, list, edit, list, edit, list, rather than edit edit edit list list list. I think collating the tasks works better for me right now…this allows me to get a couple things listed almost every day which I think helps in the ebay algorithm (new listings rise to the top of searches over old listings). I keep going at this, grabbing a piece of toast or cup of tea throughout the day…getting as many things listed as I can, until about 7pm when I am DONE and move to the sofa to watch kdramas with my All Things Korean friend in Arizona. We start shows at the same time (“I’m at :03,” “Me, too,” “Okay, go!”) and comment back and forth via text. This has been a nightly routine since…sometime last fall. We’re both at about the same level in our Korean learning and met on the Korean language server we use. We watch til one of us is falling asleep – usually me since I’m 3 hours ahead. Then I climb into bed by 10 or 11 and fall asleep instantly. That’s a typical Saturday these days.

Sunday: Do all the other stuff, ha. Since January, Sunday was when I’d prepare my lesson plans for the ESL class, that usually took 2-3 hours. In the Korean class I’m currently taking, homework assignments are due on Saturdays…so I can take a breather from that on Sunday and start up again the following day (each weekly module has 5 units so I try to do one each day M-F). I let myself sleep in a little on Sundays. I can scroll social for awhile. This morning I got so worked up over all the political stuff going on, I finally had to shut’er down and step away from the little machine. I went to the deli for a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, which is part of a weekly ritual. I get home and watch an entire episode of whatever show I’m watching currently while eating my breakfast. “Meal TV” is not dramas, but more like reality shows. The one I’m watching now is called Love Recall. It’s a Korean reality show where couples (dating, not married) have broken up… and one of the couple wants to try and get back together, so the show brings them together to talk things out and then later in the studio you have to wait to see if the other person shows up to give the relationship one more try. Oh the suspense. The panel is adorable and always rooting for the couples…and sometimes they agree to give it another try, but probably most of the time they don’t. It’s always interesting to get to hear the two sides of the “what went wrong” story. I’m on Episode 18 and it’s 32 episodes, so that’s going to be my breakfast show for awhile! After I ate/watched, a listed a couple more ebay items (I didn’t get to them all yesterday), then tried to straighten up this mess of an apartment. Ebaying is messy business. There’s always piles of stuff waiting to be cleaned, to be photographed, to be listed, to be sold, to be packed and shipped out. The piles move from place to place…and hopefully don’t sit on the “listed” shelving unit too long. Then there’s boxes of packing peanuts and rolls and pieces of bubble wrap…peanuts on the floor…boxes of all sizes and shapes waiting to having something packed in them for shipping.

Boxes Are My Life

And here it is, 5:30…and I still have a tablefull of things to pack for shipping tomorrow…I’ll call it quits when I’m done with them – around 6:30. I’ll put on my nightgown while it’s still light out and move to the sofa to start a new drama tonight at 7pm.

And that was the “easy” day.

It won’t always be like this. And maybe one weekend a month I let myself out for good behavior and meet a friend Out in the World. That was last weekend: brunch in Queens with good food, a strolling musician, and a dog on the next table. So this weekend I had to really stay IN and work. Maybe in a couple weeks I can get out to play again a little bit. When I leave the house I’m just always thinking of the things NOT being listed on ebay and the clock ticking. In two weeks the language server is shutting down for two weeks so I’ll have a little more weekeday afternoon time to ebay so maybe I can have a little breathing room on the weekend.

Fingers crossed.

Make sure to check out what my friends are doing this weekend, too:

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own