Weekend Plans: 02.03.18 “Raining All Weekend” Edition + How do you feel on Fridays? Do you work weekends?

Happy Friday Dear Blogging Family,

I’m not really sure if I’m super happy it’s Friday or if I’m having a hard day because I’m tired and I still have to get through many hours of work.

How do you usually feel by Friday? Ecstatic or dead? 

Does the day go by really fast or super slow because you cannot wait for the weekend to begin? Share your thoughts with me.

If you work weekends, which I have for so many years before, I hope work is good to you and that your day off comes soon enough. I didn’t mind Saturdays but I always hated working on Sundays. Imagine working 8 p.m to 1 a.m on a Sunday. Gosh, I’m tired just thinking about it.

Thankfully, I no longer work on weekends, which is great for other reasons too, as Rui used to be at home while I was working because he never worked weekends.

So Friday is here and I need to make some plans.

 

This weekend I’d like to:

• Watch the Oscars, obviously. This Sunday. I mean, for me it’s actually on Monday, since it does not start until 1 a.m. I really hope I don’t get sleepy and miss it like I did last year. #shameonme
• Watch the six nominees for best picture I haven’t seen yet. I’m hoping to get started on this tonight. How am I going to watch 6 movies in 2 days? Well, it’s raining so it’s not like I’m actually going anywhere. We had planed on doing some gardening but that is obviously not happening because of the bad weather.
• Laundry. When it’s raining, we use our indoor hanger combined with our dehumidifier and our space heater, sometimes. We don’t own a drier. I kind of thought about buying a washer/drying when we bought our washer a few months ago but it was twice as expensive, it’s a waste of energy, not environmentally friendly, and we don’t have a real need for it because we get so much sun in Portugal, which allows us to dry our clothes outside most of the time. It’s also easy to dry them inside when it’s raining. If we’re desperate or if it has been raining for a few weeks we just go to the wash station to dry our laundry. It’s not expensive and it only happens on occasion. I have a ton of laundry to put away too.
• Clean/Organize our bedroom (which doubles as my home office). This includes: Dusting, cleaning the surfaces, vacuuming the floor and rugs, mopping the floor, changing our sheets, cleaning the windows a bit. We have this table (that used to be Rui’s desk) that I’m using as a vanity but it’s huge (1.50 m long) and it’s taking way too much space so I’m definitely disassembling it and storing it in the garage because I don’t think we have a place for it anywhere in the house. Our bedroom is big enough but this table just takes too much space and I don’t want the room to look too cluttered.
• Clean our living room. We should definitely get our sofa covers washed. I feel like we’re always doing this but they’re whitish and we have a dog. She doesn’t think to clean her dirty paws before going inside, the bitch! I hate to throw a blanket on the sofa but I need to accept the fact that old people are right and it really saves the covers a lot of washed. If IKEA didn’t charge 60€ for covers for a 300€ couch I would have bough new covers by now. I feel like they’re too expensive and I’d be better off buying a new, used sofa. We need to dust, vacuum and mop the floor.
• Clean our kitchen. I really want to go through every single item in our kitchen and do a general de-clutter and deep cleaning. Let’s hope I’m not as lazy as last weekend.
• Work on my freelance work project for a few hours.
• Read blogs.
• Update my planner for next week.

What about you? Big plans for the weekend?

Let’s talk soon.

*Beautiful rainy pictures are from Pixabay

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My after vacation to-do list – August 16th to August 31st (Part I)

Hey there,

Happy Saturday everyone!!

I hope you’re having a fun weekend.

I’m very happy because I’ve been able to get Rui hooked up on Outlander and to watch the first episode of The Handmaids Tale. He is really hooked up on the show and has watched about 8 episodes without me, the bastard. Now he’s annoying because he remembers all the little details that I have forgotten because I’ve watched the first season in 2015 or something like that. The stupid thing is, I’ve been telling him he would love the show for years. So he’s been missing out.

The Mister is making dinner while I blog.

We’ll technically be on vacation until the 16th (I say technically because we’re not doing anything special. We want to go to the beach but the wind has been absolutely crazy. Only today we’ve had about four seasons in one day. It rained, there was a little cold a fog, and now it’s sunny but still so damn windy. I love where we live, but we have this sort of micro-climate, always different from the rest of the country and unexpected. I don’t really mind if it’s humid or raining or suddenly super hot, but the wind (the strong wind) really gets on my nerves. My poor plants have to shake it off all day long and they don’t even know Taylor Swift.

We have a few things to get done before our vacation is over. They’re mostly things that Rui can do and I probably can’t. Our outside (patio) walls need some work and a few coats of paint. Our fences need to be changed and our gate needs to be fixed. We’re also probably power washing the outside walls, windows and shutters with the pressure washer we have just bought. Some trees need trimming as well and I need to move some plants. We have washed our living room rug but the one we have in our bedroom (which is bigger and heavier) is yet to be cleaned. These are things we usually take care of together, every Summer.

After he goes back to work, I have my own big to-do list to tackle before my the school year begins at September 1st. Actually, school doesn’t officially start between the 8th and the 13th of September, but I go back to work on the 1st.

Yesterday, I’ve bought the books I’ll need for my 8th and 9th grade tutoring. I might occasionally need to deal with older students (10th-12th) but I’ve got tonnes of material for those grades, as I’ve worked with them more often.

I’ve got my work schedule, which is great because I like to be prepared in advance. My hours will be:

• Monday, Thursday and Friday – 5 p.m to 7 p.m;
• Tuesday – 5 p.m – 8 p.m;
• Wednesday – 2.30 p.m – 7 p.m;
• When the kids are on school break: Monday – Friday from  10 a.m to 1 p.m;

I’m really lucky because this schedule really works for me.

I also have two birthdays coming up. Two of my best friends have their birthdays in August. Alison on the 15th and Catarina on the 20th.

My to-do list –  From August 16th to August 31st:

School and work

• Study for the 3 exams I need to take in September to finish my degree in Languages, Literature and Cultures with a Major in North American Studies and a Minor in English. Sadly, I’m not able to take the 4 exams I need to take my second minor in History. The exams will be between September 5th and 7th and they are: Business English (I can do this one with my eyes closed, two broken arms and in a coma), Italian A 2 (I might be able to do this one with just one good eye and two broken arms, while juggling glasses) and North American Cinema (for this one I need to study my ass of because I have about 200, 475, 973 pages to read). I need to remember the sign up date which is from August 28th to August 31st.
• Do some revisions and prepare material for my 8th and 9th grade kids. I haven’t taught Portuguese grammar since last year and I always need some revision. Sadly (or proudly) I know every single English grammar rule by heart but I can’t say the same about my own language.
• Get the works of fiction and poetry they kids will be studying (Hello, Camões) because I don’t have all of them. I may need to borrow some from my sister and find others online.
• Make a list on all the books I have lent to old students and ask them to return them to me. There’s a bunch of people out there with my books.
• Return all of the ficking books I have from about 4 ficking libraries. I’m late and the old librarians will kick my butt.
• Buy a pencil-case!! (exciting)
• Maybe wash my work bag? Maybe.
• Get Rui to format my PC and then organize it.
• Take care of some social security/tax documents.
• I should probably get a school year planner instead of my yearly one.

So, this is part one. I might have forgotten something but I’ll remember it at some point.

What else is new?

• I’m almost finished with Upstairs, Downstairs.
• I stopped taking my birth control pill (not trying to get pregnant) because I realized it was responsible for some weight gain and liquid retention.
• I’ve been doing some extra online work.
• I’ve been working on our magazine “Bumblebee Magazine”.

That’s it for now, dearest friends.

We’ll talk tomorrow, pinky promise.

What do you really must get done before September?

Love, Chey.