Early Wake Up Calls

After living together for a whopping 10 days, I'm already predicting what our two main points of contention will be:

1. doing dishes

2. hitting the snooze button

Dan and I have different philosophies when it comes to doing dishes. Thanks to my mother, I insist on putting dishes in the dishwasher as soon as I'm done eating (at least when I'm not living alone). With pots/other things that need to be hand washed (which in my book is only pots, and only if they don't fit in the dishwasher…), I fill them with water and soap and leave them, but always wash before I go to bed. 

Dan puts dishes somewhere in the vicinity of the sink...and normally washes everything within 24 hours. He doesn't like hand washing anything until he's got enough to make it worth filling up the sink with soap and water and doing some intense washing. I'm more of a squirt some dish soap on the sponge and scrub clean kind of person.

I think I'll just have to become more relaxed about dishes going in the dishwasher right away...as long as Dan doesn't expect me to be all super-dishwasher for the hand wash stuff. A sponge works just fine as far as I'm concerned.

The snooze button is another story. Dan is not a morning person, in any stretch of the imagination. If given his way, he'd probably sleep from like 2am-noon every day. That obviously doesn't work with real life, especially with his job. His regular hours at Lewis are from 7:30am-5:30pm Monday through Saturday. And he has to commute an hour to get there. That means leaving the apartment between 6:15 and 6:30 depending on his first launch time. As I observed this morning, part of his morning routine involves sitting down for a couple of bowls of cereal while reading Time Magazine, which takes as long as it takes me to shower, if not longer.

I've managed to master getting out of the apartment in about 30 minutes in the morning. It involves not doing my hair whenever possible, picking out clothes the night before, packing my lunch the night before, and basically just having everything ready to go in the morning. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually eaten breakfast at home, oatmeal in a coffee mug at work has totally replaced that. I don't have to be at work (at least during this rotation) really until 8:30 but I try to get in around 8 so I can leave closer to 4:30 than 5. That means I get up around 7-a full 1.5 hours after Dan's phone doesn't just ring, but blares poor quality, very loud music at least three times over-and that's just the individual alarms, not counting the snooze buttons!

Since he's on summer hours now, it’s not quite as bad, but at some point we'll have to figure out a routine. He'll start his regular schedule next week, and I just can't deal with the early wake-up call, especially since I won't always be going to bed with him at 10:30 or 11. Dan is also allergic to the word routine, whereas I would marry my combined outlook-google calendar if I could figure out a way.

As much as I don't want to admit it, I think the best solution is me getting up at 5:30 with him. This would be great if I were still working out in the mornings (for awhile I was hooked on a 6am workout class twice a week and would run another two weekday mornings), but this is a little more complicated because I have every intention of getting rid of my car so that will increase the amount of time required to get to the gym in the mornings (running takes 15 minutes aka leaving about 5:40 and I really don't want to do that in the dark). I could potentially go to a 5:30am class and take Dan's car...but that involves getting up a full 2 hours earlier than I really need to for work, not sure I can handle that. Clearly this will take a little more brainstorming...and I definitely have the incentive to figure it out quickly since I have zero desire to listen to his alarms go off every morning! Although, I may just start kicking him out of bed at the first alarm. I'll certainly be interested to see how often he's late for work though...my guess is it won't be a rare occurrence.

Pinky Pillow

Dan did manage to pass his final flight test at UND, but it certainly came down to the wire! Fortunately he finished it up Friday morning, just before leaving to head home. He decided that seeing Coldplay in Minneapolis was more important than coming home to me, so I took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy my last night without someone wondering when I’d be home by going on a boat cruise with the Union League Club. The water was too choppy so the cruise part lasted a total of 5 minutes but even that amount of time required Dramamine and caused more than a few falls. Regardless, the boat was fun; open bar was even more fun. I could tell I was out with the ULC crew when our next stop was a sushi restaurant in River North (as opposed to something more along the lines of John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville) and I surprised myself by enjoying the one piece of sushi I sampled! Thanks to Leia, Colleen, Wayne, and Catherine for making it a wonderfully enjoyable night!

I had my first adventure to the Green City Market in Lincoln Park on Saturday morning. It’s a huge
farmer’s market and I was thrilled to realize that I could buy lots of different things because I finally had someone else to share them with. No more freezing or throwing away perishables! I told Dan that I was most excited for him to come home so I didn’t have to throw any more food away and so I didn’t have to take the garbage out any more (this qualifies as a disgusting chore and therefore one that I don’t do). Speaking of chores, I also edited and put our chore chart on the fridge, no comments from the roommate about that one yet.

My schedule on Saturday didn’t quite line up so that I was home exactly when Dan got there, but
fortunately I was still able to help unload the car. Even after his long drive, he still humored me and went to the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra Concert in Millennium Park. I also bought some of his favorite foods (pretzel rolls, really yummy cheddar cheese, and cantaloupe) to bribe him to come. We didn’t stay for the whole concert but I was glad to get to one finally!

Sunday brought on our first major battle. On Saturday my mom called asking me to dinner on Sunday
and I told her that I was going to a young adult event at church the next evening so I turned her down.
Dan informed me that we were going to his dad’s for dinner on Sunday night. My first issue was that he agreed to this without checking with me about my plans. It would have been fine for him to agree to go, but it’s a totally different thing to say I’ll be there too. As it happened, even if I hadn’t been planning to go to church and the YAC get together, I still wouldn’t have felt right going since my mom offered first. In the end he just ended up going out there and I went with my original plans, which turned out just fine.

It’s going to be pretty difficult to balance the demands of 4 separate parental entities, and I think my
mom is mad/jealous because I stayed at my dad’s last weekend and had lunch with him last week so
was trying to get to spend time with me. Seems like we’ll have to plan to have a meal or spend time with one parent every week. Or maybe we’ll just make them all come over for dinner once a month and call it a day. Fortunately, with both my parents working within a mile of me, I can take care of them during the workday. And ¾ of our parents live within a couple mile radius in Oak Park. I think what will end up working best is trying to have dinner out in the suburbs during the week, or maybe on Fridays. It’s easy enough for me to take the green line out and since Dan will be driving anyways, we could easily be back in the city by 9 or so since his commute out there will be better/shorter than the one back to the city. I really dislike heading out there on Sunday nights because of church as well as just mentally preparing myself for the week ahead, it’s nice to be in the city. Dan’s playing soccer in Elmhurst (suburb just a bit west of where we grew up) on Friday nights through Thanksgiving, so that will be weird to still have those evenings to myself. Probably a good thing though, since he’ll be working on Saturdays he wouldn’t want to go out anyways and it’ll probably be better commute out there than coming into the city on Friday nights. I’ll probably be a good girlfriend and take the metra or green line out to watch some games, but not all of them for sure.

Our other battles have been smaller, but not surprising at least:

Money-I’m trying to plan things out already and he isn't working yet. We’ve already discussed that I’m in charge of finances, and remembering how tough it was for me starting out last year, I just
want to be aware of what we’re facing salary and expense wise.

Schedule-I live and breathe by my combined google/outlook calendars…Dan doesn’t operate with a
calendar at all. I think the compromise here is just me printing out a calendar and hanging it on the
fridge for each week. We’ll see how that works. At least he’ll know where I am even if I don’t know
where he is. Granted he now thinks he has to ask my permission for everything he does. Totally
unnecessary, as long as we haven’t already discussed doing something together at the same time. To
make things worse, I’m in a really bad mood when schedules change, which is a lifelong battle with
myself. I’m working on it, but very far from perfect.

Decorations-I refrained from hanging up anything on the walls or placing any frames/decorations
around the apartment until Dan got home so we could make joint decisions. Now, I have lego and model airplanes decorating at least half of the visible surfaces in the apartment. At least the UND model planes match the green in our bedspread, but we’ll have to make some compromises on everything else. I refuse to hang up anything on the wall that doesn’t have a frame (i.e. posters), hard limit for me. Dan doesn’t want pictures of friends, just us. We’ll have to see about that one.

Cleanliness-we have different standards for cleaning. After living with 2 other 22/23 year old guys, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me except that Dan insists he’s cleaner than them. TBD.

Clothes-I take up too much closet space for him to hang his tshirts, sorted by color. He doesn’t like that I leave my pajamas on the bed. I finally got around to taking clothes to the dry cleaners yesterday and discovered he had thrown a bunch of other stuff on the dry cleaning laundry basket. I attempted to ask him what he wanted me to take, but apparently didn’t communicate clearly enough since I got yelled at for leaving behind a pair of pants he wanted me to take in. I told him to take them himself, he’s not working today. And to stop putting clothes over there that don’t need dry cleaned.

Pinky pillow-this was a short-lived battle, as I understand where Dan comes from. But as I was reading in bed last night, Dan grabs the pillow where it happened to be near my elbow and says “Sarah, do you think it’s time to give up the pillow you’ve been sleeping with since you were in your crib?” There’s really no other way to answer that besides yes. So for anyone who has lived with me and/or had a sleepover with me since about the age of 2….pinky pillow is now going to find a place of honor that is somewhere other than my bed. Probably in a box in my dad’s storage area with my blankie. I’ve officially traded a teddy bear and a pillow for a Dan, I guess it’s worth it.

There are definitely some distinct advantages to my “new roommate” as my mother refers to him as. As mentioned before, I no longer have to take out trash or recycling. He’s in charge of cleaning the kitchen surfaces even when I’m the one making a huge mess. I have someone to share meals with-like actually cooked together and sat down and prayed and had a dinner conversation last night. My bed is always made when I come home which never happened when I lived on my own. I can now watch Netflix on the TV through an XBOX 360 that I questionably know how to work. There’s also boy clothes to wear all the time, which I know Melissa will be jealous of (we may or may not have dressed up as boys for Alpha Chi’s Halloween chapter…basically our excuse to walk around in large pj pants, boxers, and an oversized sweatshirt). Plus there’s that whole fact that I love him and I’m sooooooooo excited to not be in a long-distance relationship anymore. And no one will have to listen to my rants about certain things anymore, sorry to disappoint, Mike.

So that pretty much sums up the first few days, 72 hours and we’re surviving! I’m still dreading the
major blow up that I’ve been told is inevitable when moving in together. Once that happens I will finally give into his demands to get a cat. Dan just can’t let me go to the animal shelter alone because I will almost certainly come out with a dog.