Day 171 - Crosswords and Oaters

We’ve been here a little over a month now, and we’ve gotten into a routine in the evenings that seems to work for everyone. I may be crazy within a few weeks, but until then this is how it’s going to go. I serve dinner at 5:30. We have to call it supper or a lot of confusion ensues. Dinner is lunch. Breakfast is breakfast. Supper is served on TV trays while we watch the news. News has to be the local NBC affiliate. CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are no good. We watch the news until 7:00 so we see an hour of local and a half hour of national news. There seems to be a lot of overlap, but when you’re as forgetful as Nelson it doesn’t matter so much.

At 7:00 we switch over to Wheel of Fortune followed by Jeopardy at 7:30. Nelson has watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy every night as long as I’ve known him. Sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 Anne stops by on her way home from work. If I’ve made a big enough dinner she will take some home for herself and her husband. She visits with Nelson for a while. When she leaves, Nelson walks her to the door. After she’s gone my wife generally goes back to work in the office.

At 8:00 I find a movie on the Western channel for Nelson and I to watch. These usually run to 9:30 or 10:00. After the movie Nelson goes to bed. If the movie runs long Nelson goes to bed anyway if he’s tired. If he goes to bed before the movie is over I have to watch the rest of it and give him a detailed account of the ending over breakfast the following morning. So for four and a half to five hours every night I’m tied up watching TV with Nelson or on his behalf. If I try to do something else he calls me every five minutes or so to see when I’m coming back. If I tell him I’d rather do something else he gets upset because he thinks I don’t like him. It’s way easier just to watch the TV.

When the movie is over I do the dishes. Sometimes I’ll do the dishes during Wheel or Jeopardy. During Anne’s visit is generally a good time to do this, but if for some reason her visit is short or delayed, I then have to watch the game shows and supply the answers (in the form of a question of course for Jeopardy) before the contestants do. Nelson loves when I do this. He thinks I am brilliant.

Nelson is also impressed when I knock off a crossword puzzle in 15 or twenty minutes. He loves crossword puzzles himself, so we have this in common. He brags to everyone who will listen that I do them in ink. I keep telling him that I use a pen because I can’t see the pencil marks, but he prefers to believe that using a pen is a sign of supreme and well-placed confidence. It’s nice to have someone who thinks that I am smart. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have the people I work for think that I am as smart as Nelson does. I think that would go a long way to making the workday more palatable.