time warp

Is it weird to do a more thoughtful, introspective blog post on a Friday afternoon? It feels out of place when the rest of the internet is all "gah, I can't think anymore. here, look at this picture of a kitten in a hat!"

For a while now I've been trying to figure out why The Awesome Husband and I never seem to have enough time. We don't see friends and family as often as we like because we're constantly feeling like any precious free time needs to be spent decompressing and de-stressing. It's especially perplexing because we don't have children to look after (the pup is a lot of work, but I'm sure kidlets are a whole other ballgame), and The Awesome Husband isn't currently working 40 hours most weeks. Running the household should not be this hard.

I had an epiphany, though, as I was feeding boneless pork chops through a food mill to be ground up and turned into filling for baked egg rolls. In one sense, we live as though it's 1954. Obviously, I don't mean that our lives are 1954-esque in the sense of a wife maintaining the home while her husband goes off to work. Around here, the reverse if the norm more often than not. And I definitely don't mean it in the sense of getting all dressed up for dusting, because really, who dusts these days?

We tend to be a bit retro, though, when it comes to how we get things accomplished around the house. We try to live in accordance with our values (frugal/healthy/environmentally sustainable), so we do things like dry our laundry outside in the summer, reserving the dryer for rainy or cold weather. We grow a lot of our own vegetables, watering the garden from a rain barrel rather than a hose hooked up to the water supply. We make pretty much all of our own food -- not to the level of churning our own butter or anything, but we certainly don't buy a lot of processed or otherwise "convenient" foods (sliced bread, bran cereal, and granola bars are about the extent of it in a normal week). There's never been a dishwasher in our kitchen, and when our microwave died a couple years ago, we purposefully never replaced it.

For the most part these are all things we do happily and by design.* We don't really take anything to the point where it becomes unpleasant. I mean, if the tomato plants have a bad year, we just go out and buy tomatoes at the store. We're lucky like that. But there's nothing like a salad made entirely out of vegetables that you grew -- or our really low utility bills, for that matter.

The catch, though, is that a lot of this stuff takes extra time. Science and technology as a sociological catalyst, allowing households to run more efficiently and thus freeing up time for both spouses to work: that's great in theory, unless you opt out of many of those time-saving advances. And when one spouse works part time while the other works more than 40 hours a week, it's essentially the equivalent of having both people working, which of course is the expectation now for households without small children.

I suspect there may not be an actual solution here. I mean, there's very little chance that we'll just up and decide to have frozen pizza for dinner every night to save time. No way, no how. I'll have the pesto and spinach stuffed pork chops with bakes sweet potato fries, thankyouverymuch. (Did I forget to mention as one of our core values that we love-love-love good food?)

It is nice, though, to come to this realization that we're tired and we don't have as much time as we'd like because we're living the lives we want to live. It's so much better than thinking "what is WRONG with us?"



*The exception? Dishes. Oh man, the dishes. We would install a dishwasher in a heartbeat if we could.