Downtime

13, July 2013

THE SON:

I had been going stale whilst at home in the weeks leading up to leaving for America and now that I’m here I can look back and realise why.

The main reason was that I felt I was in a rut and part of the movie “Groundhog Day” as every day felt exactly the same. My father and I were not getting on at all and constantly at each others throats. Him because he is not working at the moment and keeps going upstairs to his office to listen to old songs that he had written for shows gone by so he would get more and more depressed about no one doing them and feeling like the world was dealing him a harsh blow. This in turn gave him an extremely short fuse and so to make my days slightly more interesting, I would intentionally wind him up and do all the things I could think of that annoy him.

Quite immature of me, I know, but it annoyed me to hear him constantly listening to his songs and then get even lower. The atmosphere in our house wasn’t nice for my mother at all to hear both of us shouting at one another for about 3 straight weeks.

Anyway, I think it is a blessing for both my father and I that I am away for a month as it will do us the world of good to have some cooling off time.

Since arriving in Massachusetts I have developed the perfect routine whereby I wake up at 8AM and then am able to watch most of the day’s play of the Ashes through Sky Go on my laptop, so I don’t miss more than a couple of wickets. Also, it is something that my father and I have in common to text each other about, therefore we are sort of “re-bonding” through the great game of cricket.

So, during the tea break, which is 4pm UK time but 11AM my time I open up my maths pack set by my brilliant teacher back in UK and get stuck into an hours maths questions (I have just done decimals, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) which I continue to do during the cricket but put it on mute.

Then I have the afternoon free to do whatever. I have been swimming in the freshwater lake, played golf yesterday but accidentally took a wrong turn and ended up on the 9th when I thought it was the 5th so had a short round. It’s a good system.

Also our rental car is incredible. A Nissan Rogue 2013 SUV that has the loudest most bass-heavy subwoofer-ed sound system I’ve ever witnessed and an input for my iPhone. Also it has a button called “Sport” which I turn on at every red light which makes the acceleration awesome and so I always leave everyone in my dust.

Anyway, I’m about to go do a gigantic food shop at Price Chopper so I will leave it for today.

THE MOM:

Am really excited by the bass-heavy subwoofer-ed sound system too, you know me. What a trip to Price Chopper THIS is going to be.