Sometimes the hardest part about making a life with someone is syncing your schedules.

Steve and I have been living together for three years and even now, it’s difficult to work around each others wants and needs.

These past few weeks have been quiet.  There have been a few changes in my life that have given me more time but less pay.  Thus, I find myself with some half days during the week and less money in my pocket at the end of two weeks.

I’ve spent those days cleaning and running errands and doing stuff that would normally take up my weekends.  Stuff that would normally keep me from spending time with Steve or the dog or family or from doing nothing.  Just normal house stuff – laundry, cleaning, errands, phone calls, bills.  In all honesty, I’m loving it because by last Friday night, my house was spotless, my to-do list was virtually non-existent, and I could sit on the couch and surf the Internet all night guilt free.

The problem was I was exhausted.  My sleep schedule has been thrown off with my foot injury and allergy meds and thunderstorms that keep me awake until god awful hours of the morning (plus a dog who is terrified of thunder and insists on crawling in bed and snuggling with us everytime he hears a sound) so by Friday evening, all I wanted to do was plop on the couch, eat a good dinner, watch some TV and surf the Net.  And I would have been perfectly content to do that all weekend.  Mostly because I was trying to save money and also because the sheer effort of getting dressed and making myself looked human was utterly unappealing at the time.

Steve, on the other hand, wanted to go out.  Somewhere, anywhere.  He wanted to get dinner, then maybe hit up Best Buy then Wal-Mart to get some stuff.  And while I wanted to spend time with him, it would require makeup and brushing my hair and PANTS!  And I just don’t want to wear pants on most occasions (just you wait for my new header graphic – it speaks perfectly of me!).

But I put on my pants and brushed my hair and we went out to dinner.  No makeup since we were just going to get some cheesesteaks and I didn’t really care what I looked like at that point.  Then I think he compromised because afterwards he drove home instead of heading to Best Buy or WalMart.

There are times when Steve says the he wants to stay in and have a relaxing weekend and I jump for joy.  Because that means I can sleep late and hang around the house and just be lazy.  And generally he means it, until about 3pm on Saturday when he is so utterly bored that he turns into a five year old and whines because he’s so bored and he can’t find anything to do and let’s do something.  Which leads to me feeling either guilty because I feel like I need to suggest we do something and we need to spend time together or feeling resentful and angry because we have all of this expensive shit and he can’t entertain himself.

It’s just striking that balance that’s hard.  I think we did well with it this past weekend.  We went out for cheese steaks on Friday night then met some friends for dinner on Saturday evening.  And while that may not have been enough for him, it was enough for me.  It was fairly reasonable as far as money went and we both got a chance to get out of the house and not drive each other insane.  But we were able to relax enough to feel like we had not drove ourselves crazy overdoing things.

We have enough stuff coming up this summer that we really need to be able to enjoy the downtime.

In the meantime, we are making plans and trying to strike a balance there.  We’ve got some trips in the works, some trips that are specifically for us to enjoy and some that allow us to visit with people who we haven’t seen in awhile.  We’ve got some movies to look forward to and some dinners and small events with friends.  We’ve got an enjoyable summer ahead of us.

And now we just have to work out an amicable schedule between the two of us.  Because I want to sleep until 10am darn it!  And somebody in this house like to wake up at 7am, even on Saturdays!