It’s allergy season, tax season, the approach of summer, and the space between those things and our travels. It’s easy to write about a trip somewhere as there’s a kind of excitement of going places, but what of these days when routine happens on a regular basis? Every day, we head out early in the morning, typically before 6:00 a.m., for a walk, and we suffer from the allergens that fill the air at this time of year. Every day, I think about doing the taxes, but I have until the 18th, so there is time. The air-conditioning is now on every day as temperatures have consistently been in the mid-90s here in Phoenix. It’ll likely stay this way, only much hotter, for the next four and a half months. Nearly every day, I find myself at a coffee shop at one point or other, typically first thing after dropping Caroline at her office.

I finished working out a two-week meal plan as we focus on the older things in our pantry and freezer that need to be eaten instead of thrown away; rarely do we ever throw food away. Writing about the once-a-week ritual of washing clothes is definitely of no interest for a blog post, but that kind of mundane thing is part of the mundane human maintenance usually glossed over. Gas is supposedly more expensive, and I guess it is, but that seems inconsequential in the scheme of things, considering I’m paying $45 a gallon for iced soy lattes at Starbucks in the afternoon on top of the $37-a-gallon Americanos I drink in the morning. But these details are just boring, maybe even hackneyed.

If I’m adequately busy and productive during the day, I’ll “reward” myself with mindless entertainment in the evening. This is either had by reading or trying to find something of some minor value on YouTube; the latter is typically a failure, with me plumbing the depths of stupidity and probably contributing to the rot accumulating somewhere in my brain that will show itself the older I get.

This quick burst of the mundane already needs to come to an end as here at 5:00 p.m.; it’s about time to go pick up Caroline and deal with the traffic of getting home. Our dinner of crockpot beans is finished, so there’s no real culinary excitement going on there unless you are a bean aficionado like we are, in which case we are dining on Lina Sisco’s Bird Egg beans cooked long and slow with bacon and onion. So, maybe not everything is exactly mundane today.