Left to My Own Devices, part two

As you may be sick of hearing about now, for the previous five days I was alone in our house while Lisa and the girls visited her mom in Mississippi. I promise I'm not going to talk about painting, but I did want to revisit a post I made a couple of months ago. At the time we were in the exact opposite situation: Lisa and the girls were at home and I was gone for about three days and staying in a hotel room. I wrote a post about how I lived life differently when I was away from my family. But after writing it I thought to myself that a lot of the changes might not be genuine, that they might be a result of me being away from home and away from my stuff. So I thought I'd see how me alone in a hotel compared to me alone in my house. Here's what I found:

1. Even at home I don't watch much TV. I can tell you exactly what I watched while Lisa and the girls were gone:

• 20 minutes of THE MATRIX
• I played a Nintendo Wii game that I checked out of the library Thursday night. I played for about 10 minutes
• The first ten minutes of the NBC Nightly News on Friday
• Sunday morning I flipped channels while eating breakfast
• I watched the fifth set of the men's finals at Wimbledon Sunday. That WAS about 2 hours of TV, but it was exciting stuff. I kept painting while watching it, though.
• I flipped channels while eating lunch yesterday. There wasn't much on except soap operas, which I'm surprised are not being filmed in HD.

And that's it. Wait, one other thing: I DID watch two episodes of the original series of STAR TREK, but I watched them on YouTube on my computer monitor. Don't know if that counts or not.

2. I burn the midnight oil at home as well. I typically went to sleep about midnight.

In addition I discovered the following:

• Left alone, I eat cold cereal for about half of my meals.
• I also don't eat many vegetables.
• In fact, if I'm not careful, I won't eat at all. I'm really not sure what this means. When the whole family is at home I'm hungry often and eat a lot, but on my own I never seemed to get hungry and had to make myself eat.
• I was glad to discover that, instead of running the dishwasher daily, I pretty much would only need to do it once a week or so. It's still only about half full.

In any event, I'm glad they're home today. I missed them terribly.