L gets a routine.

When you are living on a budget, the first rule is to never enter a grocery store while hungry. The delicious array of donuts, strawberries, juices, and ice cream will only remind you of your own financial constraints (and may cause you to weep incessantly). 

By now, I have a routine of sorts established. Sundays involve grocery-shopping (on a full stomach) and then cooking the pasta and rice I will need to survive the rest of the week. 

After work, I'm usually starving, so I try to tackle dinner as quickly as possible. Usually it takes me 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes, I'm too tired after work to cook, so I eat a snack, take a nap, and then make dinner. I try to only eat out once or twice a week for dinner. For lunch, I pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a snack, which I eat at work. 

The internship, as promised, is amazing and I say this as someone who has thus far only gone through a week of training. I can't really write down the details of what I've learned, or the specifics of what I do on a daily basis; this is an internship that requires confidentiality. But I am enjoying it immensely and that is all that matters. 

I keep "adult hours" here; I wake up around 7:30 a.m. and I get dressed and breakfast-ed by 8:20 a.m. I catch the 8:30 a.m. bus a few blocks away and transfer once to get to work by 9:30 a.m. The commute is horrible. Without traffic, it takes less than 30 minutes to get to our office building (near the Capitol); but with traffic, it's an hour. 

I get off work around 5 p.m. and it's another hour in traffic until I get home at 6 p.m. If I don't take a nap, I can finish making dinner by 7 p.m., and eat while reading my LSAT book or in the company of my laptop. I take care of some housework after that (doing the dishes, entering receipts into my budget, cleaning, laundry, etc). I usually pass out before 11 p.m. Although there technically is a great deal of time between work and bedtime, I can't really do anything productive during that time because I'm too tired to. After work, all I really want to do is sleep.

J is still missing, but I'm not too worried because A doesn't seem to be. I can count the number of times I've seen A this week on one hand because he keeps "college hours;" I rarely see him since I'm asleep or at work when he's in the townhouse. It's a little scary to think that I keep "adult hours" and he keeps "college hours" when he's actually almost ten years older than I am.