Eleanor Roosevelt used to write a daily newspaper column called My Day. I’ve read the ones that were considered interesting enough to compile and print in a book (imaginatively titled My Day) and they’re about what you’d get if you went to any random blog, adjusting for the fact that Eleanor had a finger in just about every pie in Washington, D.C., let alone that she was the wife of FDR.

She didn’t let that prevent her from writing about utterly mundane things. If you can, imagine one of the Python boys seated at a doily-covered table (I’m thinking Graham Chapman would’ve made a great Eleanor Roosevelt) with a cup of tea in hand, squawking, “Someone sent me a most amusing present. When I came into my room this afternoon, I thought I was being visited by a zoo, for it was surrounded by four polar bears. On closer inspection, however, I found that the polar bears were guarding a goldfish bowl…” So, even though she was living in the White House, someone punked her room while she was out. Then, she blogged about it, because if you don’t blog about it, it didn’t happen. See? Some things never change.

That quote came from Eleanor’s January 7, 1936, column, in case you were thinking I made that up.

I’m no Eleanor Roosevelt, but I’m reminded of her column every day when My Darling B asks me, “So, what’re you going to do today?” Wow, you really want to know? I’m going to wash the dishes, then sweep the floor, then clean the cat box, then fold the laundry … eat your heart out, Eleanor!

For what it’s worth, then, here’s my day:

5:45 – Alarm goes off, get up to make coffee for My Darling B. Arguably the most rewarding thing I do all day. B gives me a kiss for it.

6:00 – Read comics while wolfing down a big bowl of granola generously doused in lactose-free milk.

6:20 – Sit on sofa to chat with B after she emerges from shower & pours herself a cuppa joe. Her side of the conversation always starts: “I don’t wanna go to work.” She always goes to work anyway, because she has a flawless work ethic.

6:45 – While B gets dressed for work, I clean out the cat boxes and fill cat feeders. A cat feeder is a great big bowl divided into five sections that rotates like a lazy susan. There’s a cover over the bowl so the cats can get to only one section at a time, and a motor turns the bowl according to a timer. The cat boxes are simple plastic pans that I have to rake the poop out of twice a day. We got the wrong motorized cat appliance.

7:00 – Drive B to work. I take the Beltline to Midvale Boulevard because it’s the fastest way to cross down. It’s also the most dangerous, hundreds of speeding cars jammed bumper-to-bumper as if it were a Nascar event. How we avoid mangled pileups & firey death every day is a mystery to me.

8:00 – Home again, home again, jiggidy-jog. Drink the rest of the coffee while reading the morning news.

8:45 – This being Monday, I applied for unemployment benefits. I can do this online in about two minutes, and thank goodness because getting through on the telephone is more agonizing than getting my teeth drilled. I think I could probably do it in less than one minute if a glitch in the system didn’t ask me to go through the login procedure twice.

8:47 – Update Facebook status & otherwise doink around on the interwebs.

9:00 – Unload the dishwasher, pile it with dirty dishes, start.

9:30 – Sort dirty clothes, throw a pile in the wash machine. Yes, I sort clothes even though I’m a guy. You can’t live with the same woman for twenty years and not sort the clothes.

9:45 – Apply for a job, something else you can do on-line in about two minutes, believe it or not. Hat tip to My Darling B for catching the vacancy announcement on the state job web site. Maybe I’ll be clerking in the Journalism department at the UW soon. Not holding my breath, though.

10:00 – Walk to the bank. This counts toward my physical conditioning for the day so I came back through Greenlawn Cemetery just to make a big circle.

11:00 – Pet the cat.

11:15 – (Yes, it took fifteen minutes to pet the cat. He’s a needy cat.) Off to the store to get nylon socks for the finches, by special request from My Darling B. No, finches aren’t into legware. These socks are bird feeders. Fill them with nyjer seed and finches come peck the seed out through the nylon mesh.

11:45 – Fix the bird feeder, fill up the thistle socks, sound the dinner bell. Go in and pout when the birds don’t come flocking to the sumptuous spread I put out for them.

12:45 – Start working on dressing up the windows I installed last weekend. The windows themselves look great, but the rough opening they’re hanging in is so rough it looks as though I used hand grenades to take out the old windows. I built a box frame around each one yesterday and I’m going to cut & fit molding around the insides today.

2:15 – Break time! Drink a quart of water while doinking around on the interwebs.

2:30 – Back to work on the other window. I’m losing hope that I’ll get a nap this afternoon.

3:45 – Knock off for the day and head for the showers to clean up before fetching My Darling B from work. The home improvement project still needs a little fine-tuning but it’ll do for now, and I really need to cool down and get unstinky before I drive across town.

5:30 – Home again, home again, jiggedy-jog. Sandwiches for dinner so B doesn’t have to spend lots of time in a hot kitchen on this hot day right before we head off to dance class.

6:30 – B catches a few winks before dance class while I doink around on the internet.

7:00 – Dance class. Swing dance tonight. It’s supposed to be a group class but only B and I show up so we get a private lesson. We learn a little technique, how to spin, do a little core work, then learn a new swing step, passing side-to-side, so we’ll have a few new moves when we go see Ladies Must Swing at the Terrace on Friday.

9:00 – Home again, home again … you know the rest. Time to relax. Wind down. Take it easy, Maybe read a couple chapters.

9:03 – Zzzzzzz …