Living Alone (Day 2)
23 y/o lives alone for a week
During the Christmas Season last 2025, my dad told me that he and my mom were going to the province to visit family and, more importantly, handle a lot of important paperwork related to some land titles that my dad has worked on finalizing for years now. I dunno how long exactly, but it has been a while. A long time before that, while my dad was still abroad, my mom asked me if I wanted to go to Mindanao for vacation when my dad came back. For various reasons, which I will probably discuss at a different time, I jokingly told my mom that I would rather stay home. Eventually, which was more like a couple of weeks after my dad came back, the question turned serious, well, not serious serious, more like plans were actually being made for the family to head to Mindanao for vacation. I still, quite adamantly, answered that I would rather stay at home, and volunteered to stay home for practical reasons, such as being caretaker for the pet chickens and dog, and also generally keeping the house safe and clean while they were away.
There wasn't really much argument about it. They asked, and I made it clear I preferred to stay home. So it was settled. For a week, beginning around 2 nights ago, I was effectively on my own in the house while mom and dad visited relatives and got their paperwork done for the week while they're there. Before they left, we got some extra groceries for me to cook with on my own for the week, and an extra budget of 6,000 Pesos for me to spend whenever I need to buy something. Specifically, my dad told me I can use it if I want to order food. Though I have mostly planned to use the money to buy dog food and extra groceries for things i need to make stuff... like stroganoff (which I have been meaning to make for some time now. My goal is to spend as little of that money as possible so that I will have enough to buy a new keyboard from Datablitz when they get back and feel good about it.
That's basically the full context of why I am currently living alone for the week. TLDR: I didn't want to go with my parents on vacation, so I volunteered to stay home to watch over the house, keep stuff clean, receive packages, and take care of our pets and chickens.
Originally, I wanted to write about this yesterday, the first day I was fully alone in the house, but I forgot at the time, and I was too busy having fun being alone. Nothing much really happened aside from me going to a friend's house to celebrate his birthday. I also made a new batch of kombucha to ferment for the week and also a couple of experimental overnight oatmeal puddings, but aside from that, nothing much. I consider yesterday to be a "transition period". Today, however, I was just, fully at home with nothing much to do, except for one thing... CLEANING!
I dunno, it felt like something responsible for me to do early on. I mainly focused on cleaning outside because, due to time and rain, a bunch of green algae (lumot) has propped up in the stone and surfaces of the house, which made a lot of things look really ugly at least, and dangerously slippery at worst. My dad slipped one time while opening the garage, and I have slipped several times when stepping outside my gate; that's how bad it was. So I placed it upon myself to scrub the damn lumot off the cemented ground in the driveway and the stairs leading up to the viewing deck, so it would look pretty and not slippery.
I dunno, it felt like something responsible for me to do early on. I mainly focused on cleaning outside because, due to time and rain, a bunch of green algae (lumot) has propped up in the stone and surfaces of the house, which made a lot of things look really ugly at least, and dangerously slippery at worst. My dad slipped one time while opening the garage, and I have slipped several times when stepping outside my gate; that's how bad it was. So I placed it upon myself to scrub the damn lumot off the cemented ground in the driveway and the stairs leading up to the viewing deck, so it would look pretty and not slippery.
Little did I know, this would take up a majority of the time throughout the day. I was exhausted, but there were still several other tasks to do. such as:
- Laundry (which I could've done later in the week, but considering the lack of hangars in the house, fuck it, I'll do it while the pile's small)
- feeding the chickens' afternoon meal (I already gave them their morning meal before this)
- cleaning the inside of the house.
- Making rice, not just for me to eat, but also for the cats, while I don't have cat food, and I used the wash water to make the next batch of chicken feed for the next day.
It may be a short list, but it was each task took a really long time to do and required a lot of my attention and brain cells in order to accomplish. Brain cells that have been dysfunctioning so much that there have been several moments througout today where I would leave an item someehere, walk out to do a task, remember to do a different task when I get back, and when all of that's done, forget what I needed to get for a while, before remembering the item I wanted to get after doing, and then forgetting where I put that item. And then I spend the next 10 to 30 minutes of my life looking for it, only for me to suddenly see it in the weirdest places possible. Like seriously, I have left remotes in the kitchen and my power bank in the roof of my dog's cage. I should really get that checked, but not now.
It was a long and tiring day of mostly scrubbing dirt and shit off cement, cleaning, and feeding the animals, but all that hard work resulted in lunch tasting really good all of a sudden, probably because I was really tired and hadn't eaten anything else aside from a little oatmeal pudding cup from the night before and several glasses of water. It wasn't much, just some leftover kare-k.are dad my dad didn't like from when my family ate at Manam a few days ago. That little cup of leftover food fed me for both lunch and dinner; I don't really eat a lot in general since I get full easily, and I'm on a diet, so I was able to stretch it out.
Speaking of eating, yesterday night was also the first time I cooked the chicken feed on my own, unsupervised. I probably made too much, so after the morning and afternoon feedings for today, I still had 1/3rd of the pot left over that I decided to use as their morning feed, so that I would only need to worry about making a batch for the afternoon portion, and also the portion for the next day if I portion everything out right.
While we are on the subject of food and animals, another highlight of the day is related to my dog! My dog, Essek, is a particularly picky eater. Really, he wouldn't even eat certain types of human food at times. Essek's pickiness was something that pissed off my mom a lot to the point where she relented and bought dedicated meats to cook and feed him. Them being gone and me being home alone gave me just the right amount of unsupervised freedom needed to experiment around to see what it would take to make him eat. If he ate the same amount for both the morning and evening feeding times and finished a majority of what was served to him, then I would consider it a success.
My thinking was that by heating up Essek's dog kibble, which he absolutely hates eating and would sometimes even jump out of the way if we pushed the bowl towards him, it would heat it enough for it to be fragrant and thus more palatable and appetizing for him to eat. My mom also told me to cook some ground pork as well, just as something to entice him. Her original intention was that I just mix cold cooked ground pork into his kibble as is and serve it to him. Essek, in turn, being the picky eater that he is, would only eat the pork bits and ignore the rest.
What I did was chuck the kibble, and a couple scoops of the ground pork for good measure into the air fryer for like 3 minutes. Cooking at max temperature, it was enough to not only reheat the pork, but also make the dog kibble very fragrant. The kibble even excreted a bit of its own oils (or maybe that was pork fat), and it smelled very strongly of graham crackers and mostly liver spread. Obviously, I wasn;t going to serve my dog piping hot food, since that would hurt him and he probably wouldn't eat it while hot, so I had to cool it down by blowing at it. As I did that, I blew the food smell towards my dog, giving him a sneak peek at the deliciousness that awaits him. Surely enough, he gobbled it all up! I was surprised he actually managed to finish it all, and seemed to enjoy it more than anything else we served him. That was nice. I have to replicate it tomorrow, though... or later today, considering that, as of writing this sentence, it is currently 3:07AM....
The rest was mundane. I cleaned the inside of the house; did a bunch of dishes (which I hate); and while watching a bunch of YouTube on the TV, shredded a whole head of cabbage, and used half to experiment with trying a healthy cabbage omelet recipe I saw a Japanese guy make on Instagram reels once (it was yummy :3).
I would've included a paragraph about a sad that that popped up in my head in regards to living alone that I have noticed whenever I took a break from housework, but since I'm sleepy and it's 3am... I would just leave that thought for the next blog post. Maybe my thoughts and feelings would be more organized by then.
Anyways, I hope you all are doin okay amd being safe
Thanks for reading.
-- YugiBearz
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