We are not busy people, right now

There are two questions that are asked at the Tiny House nearly every night, lately:


1) What do you want to do with the evening? and


2) What do you want for dinner?


Y'all? Busy people do NOT ask those questions.


For example, parents of young children know PRECISELY what they are going to be doing in the evening, from the moment they wake up in the morning. It rarely varies from:


Person A) get home, dump the kid's stuff, feed them dinner (choices are chicken nuggets, fish sticks, mac n' cheese, or PB&Js), bathe them, read to them, tuck them in, eat dinner, collapse; or


Person B) dig stuff out of daycare bags, wash what needs washing from that bag, empty dishwasher, do general kitchen chores (including maybe starting dinner for the adults), dry kids off, kiss their widdle heads, eat dinner, collapse.


I get tired just thinking about it, and that's the 2-person list! Imagine what single moms of very young children go through!!


As another example, parents of kids on sports teams or similar activities. They're not lounging around at home wondering what to pull out of the freezer to thaw and eat, oh no. They are carting kids to and fro and fro and to, helping to coach or serving on a committee, picking up fast food for dinner because practice ran long (again), researching the best equipment to buy or private teacher to engage, handing out uniforms or riding the bus to the game, raising money and hustling the behind-the-scenes action to ensure that everything goes off without hitch when it's 'go' time.


(Now, I've been these people. Most nights, at least early on, the notion of an idle evening with 'Nothing on the Program' was just a faraway dream. But that is the role of those days. Busy-ness is the norm.)


I must point out that there is another class of Busy People. These folks find busy-ness outside of the kid-intense days of parenting! They are signed up for book clubs and yoga classes and arts and crafts sessions and gym classes and plan out when they're going to entertainment venues and fill their days and nights with action, action, action. These people (confession time!!!) I do NOT understand, but will admit they exist. Like unicorns, or old white convertible VW bugs (the legendary '4 pow!'), they are rare, but enough evidence exists to know they are real. They do not have time to ask the two questions, because they have to be at the gym in 26 minutes so will just grab a smoothie on the way, thanks and let's do lunch.


But we, we former busy people of the Tiny House, have hit a moment of doldrum in life's waters, it would appear. We ask the questions every night and come up, on a regular basis, with the same plan - cook something long and involved and then go watch Star Trek. Now, it's not a BAD plan, mind you, but it is the kind of thing that Not Busy People would do as a fall-back plan. Busy People, on the other hand, grab Chipotle and meet their buds for a Appletini before going home to download four podcasts to listen to on their commute. Start Trek? Please. Busy folks are so over that, unless it's ironic or they are researching a Halloween costume that none of their friends will recognize, which is also kind of ironic.


The point of all this is to say that mentioning this 2-question reiterative lifestyle is not a complaint. It is an observation only, and one I'd like to be reminded of in the near future, because Life is about to git us up and going again. Biff's band is going to start regular practices again, the new site for church is going to need a lot of attention (and, once again, I'm leading a team for the launch and beyond while Biff will be rocking out on stage), we're going to be leading a small group discussion for 'seekers and questioners,' and there is some kind of strange plan to initiate a workout program (that's my idea, I've not yet discussed it with Biff). Rather than moping about our doldrums, then, I am planning to relish them, because as sure as poop goes through a goose, our days are going to start a faster and furious-er pace into which these long evenings of summer will rapidly recede into distant memory. We shall be Busy People once more, but probably with way fewer Appletinis (make mine a bourbon on the rocks!) and way more Star Trek.


And look! It's nearly 6 p.m. as I write this. Better go pull something out of the freezer and find a complicated recipe before it gets too late to work in Start Trek.


Tiff out.