All alone

While it is nice to live with someone, especially someone you love, a break is welcomed when it comes.  Are there benefits to it or is time alone all that I need?  Who knows.  All I know is that I enjoy having the place to myself, but also am aware the downside to it as well.  It all depends on how long the time alone is.  I got back down to Wichita on the night of the twenty eighth and A is coming back here on the twelfth.  Essentially, it's two weeks.  One of the longer stretches of her staying up there to help her parents take care of some interior house projects and just all around hanging out.  Normally it's in the seven to ten day area for her staying there, so what's a few more days?  Here's some pros and cons to being here alone.

Pros:

• I don't have to wear pants if I don't want to.  Won't even lie about, I've already not worn pants quite a bit since getting back down here.  
• The t.v. switches from just a couple of channels.  Mainly ESPN, ESPN2, history channel, Fox Sports Kansas City, weather channel.  
• One dinner lasts about a week.  I made goulash Tuesday night and just ate the last of it for dinner tonight.  
• Dinner is whenever and whatever.  We don't have a specific dinner time, but generally it's around six thirty or so.  Right now?  It could be at five.  Or nine.  Last night I ate at ten o'clock because that's when I got hungry. 
• Playing records.  While A was employed, I would get home a couple of hours before she would and every once in a while would throw a record on the player just to listen to the clicks and cracks of the old LPs.  I got to do that again this week and it's been nice. 
• Contemplation time.  Not having someone to talk to on hand sucks a little bit, it allows for time to just think.  I'll be growing my full beard back for my friend's wedding this summer because I'm in it and don't want to be 'that guy' in the wedding pictures when he looks back at them twenty or thirty years from now.  So, after the wedding, I've determined to grow my beard out a little bit.  Not as much as a couple of years ago, but a little bit fuller.  I love having facial hair. 

Cons:

• Less dishes means more actual dish cleaning.  It takes quite a while to pile up enough dishes to run the dishwasher and not feel bad about running a half empty one. 
• Feeding the cat.
• Lack of human contact.  Work doesn't really count no matter how many people you work with or talk to.  
• Days off are boring.  I didn't work this weekend and the days drug on a little bit. 
• Grocery shopping.  Ugh.  I tried my best to avoid the frozen section because I don't want to be that guy that relies on frozen foods while my wife is away.  How lame and stereotypical is that?  Although I did buy one frozen pizza.  It was BBQ chicken and it was delicious.  
• My liver.  I've been drinking a little more than usual the past couple of days.  Mayhaps not so good.

In the end, it's all good.  It's something that I would never really want to nor have had to do.  I have never lived alone.  Our second year in college, we wised up and moved out of the dorms at CMU and rented an apartment.  It was cheaper and we didn't have to deal with all the bullshit that dorms come with.  We did have to deal with all the bullshit that college apartment complexes came with, but that's just how it went.