I have these memories, dim now, that I once spend days doing whatever I wanted. Sometimes I’d do nothing more with them than lay flat on the bed and think about things for hours and hours.

But now …

I get up at five o’clock. This is so I can take my shower and shave and get that over with. B tends to take a lot longer in the bathroom than I do, and she likes to blow-dry her hair, which makes her bust a sweat, so she wants to get out the door and into the open air the minute she’s done with that. So I do my bathroom stuff first.

I’m usually done by five-twenty. I make a pot of coffee and maybe have a couple slices of toast for breakfast. B gets out of bed about the time I’m rinsing my dish off, say about quarter to six. We sit on the sofa together and drink coffee until about five or ten past six, when she begins her daily ablutions.

I go rake the cat litter, wash my hands, pack a lunch. Done at six-thirty. That gives me about ten to twenty minutes to putz around while B’s finishing up in the bathroom. Usually, I read the morning news, or Facebook, or Twitter.

It’s a half-hour drive to work. We get there at seven or seven-fifteen. I putz around for about fifteen minutes, or sometimes I just start working because, what the hell, I’m there anyway and I’ve got a metric shit-ton of work on my desk.

I get a fifteen-minute break in the morning before lunch. I usually read Twitter. Sometimes I close my eyes to rest for a bit, and hope I don’t snore loudly enough to bother any of my coworkers.

Lunch break starts at noon and ends at twelve forty-five. If it’s warm enough outside, I take a walk, because who wants to be indoors all day? I don’t. I’ve got several routes picked out that take twenty, thirty, or forty-five mintues to finish, and take the one that I’ve got time for after bolting the leftovers I brought in that day.

I get fifteen minutes for a break in the afternoon. Zzzz.

I can take my nose off the grindstone at four-fifteen, but B’s usually not done until four-thirty, so I dink around one project or another until she shows up at my desk, unless it’s been a bitch of a day; then I pack up precisely at four-fifteen and go wait in the hallway or parked right beside her desk.

It’s a thirty to forty-minute commute through the city to get home in the evening. We usually have to stop at the co-op for groceries, so we typically get home at about five-thirty. If we don’t have to go directly to yoga after changing clothes, I take a nap. If we don’t go to yoga, the only other thing I absolutely must do is clean up the dinner dishes, which doesn’t often take more than twenty minutes but can take as much as an hour if B cooks something elaborate.

I have to go to bed by ten if I want to get eight hours of sleep, and I really do want to get at least eight hours every night. Many nights, I’m in bed by nine, just to give me a little time to read before lights out.

So you see where that leaves me. Sometimes I get as much as two whole, uninterrupted hours to sit in the recliner and flip through the television channels or turn through a couple pages of the latest book I’ve picked up, but more often it’s about an hour. I just don’t know where the time went.