Today the heat breaks. The last five days I've felt trapped inside in a small box surrounded by baking heat, like I'm in a lunchbox with a couple of ice cubes that has been stuck into the oven. Leave the lunchbox, get cooked.

I'm having trouble getting going today. It is always this day on Monday mornings. It is the transition day between two types of life. The life of being around Penny, and the life of being myself and only myself, free and autonomous, able to think my own thoughts and not worry about talking about whatever is going through her head, or what she might want to do, or complain about. Free to drift through my day without needing to react to her.

It is easer, and more productive, to live without her constant chatter.

It is also lonelier.

A list of things I might write about later today, after I'm done working out, that I barely discuss, and yet occupy a fair amount of my thoughts.

  • I'm sorting the basement.
  • I've been dieting with Penny, some low-carb thing that winds up being similar to Keto or Atkins in practical terms.
  • I've been taking a lot of amino acid supplements later with mixed results.
  • I have been ignoring my mother and I should call her and see her today
  • My cutover is tomorrow
  • Penny and I fought in the car on the way back from her friends' house on Saturday
  • I think about aging a lot now that I'm forty nine. It is much different than thirty nine. At thirty nine I wasn't married and felt healthier – even though in truth I might have been less healthy, because of all the drinking I was doing. But at forty nine I am starting to see the signs in my face in a way that I simply didn't ten years ago.
  • Penny and I are watching Widow's Bay
  • I miss my high school friends – I miss, actually, just having casual male friends I can talk to. Penny is no good for talking about certain things. Fine to talk about family – moms and dads and brothers and sisters she understands. She does not understand the world of professional men, which is where I spend a lot of my time.
  • I made it a full week without smoking.

I am going to go into the basement, put on my headphones, and try to do eight minutes of farmer's walks to get that done. Then I'll need to take care of my dog Shelley while Penny gets ready for work. There's also a van coming to take her blood for IVF related activities. We are stalled out on IVF which sucks. The good parts: We have an egg to transfer. We are doing preliminary testing before moving forward. The bad part: It stresses Penny out. It stresses me out. And things are not really scheduled – there are still too many moving parts to settle before we can nail down some kind of actual date. And all the while I am getting older, and worse, fearful of getting older still.

It's complicated. But I need to get this piece scheduled – the transfer – before moving forward on fixing my left shoulder, which, I was informed last week by Doctor Number two, I probably should get surgery on before my hand starts going numb.

I do not want to be in fucking Albania doing a transfer with a sling on my arm.