I don't think I'd make a very good bachelor. Or a single mother for that matter.

My wife was out of town for a few days, looking after our granddaughter, so it was just me and her dog, plus a couple of spare dogs that joined us for the weekend.

The last time my wife left me for this long was 15 years ago. While she was gone, I filled our bread machine with powdered sugar instead of flour and forgot to pick up our youngest daughter at her karate lesson. She hasn't really left me alone since then.

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By the way, both of those incidents were accidents, and a lot of people don't notice how much powdered sugar looks like flour.

But last week she had a chance to spend some serious time hanging out with our granddaughter, so she headed off over the horizon without looking back.

I don't like being alone in the house. For one thing, nobody here likes me. The little dog wakes up and runs all over the house looking for my wife. She searches every room and when it finally dawns on her that my wife isn't here, the dog looks at me and says, "Oh. It's just you. Well what's for breakfast?"

The cat doesn't even give me that.

Another problem is that if something needs to be done, I have to do it, whether its picking up the dirty dishes in the living room, throwing a log in the fire, feeding the dog or paying the bills. I always try to do my share of the work around the house, but its a different ball game knowing that I can pray for the house cleaning fairies all I want, and then glumly realize if it was going to get done, I had to do it.

It wasn't all bad. I had bacon for breakfast two days in a row, which hasn't happened since my first cholesterol test. Of course, I had to cook it myself. I could watch anything I wanted to on TV, except there's never anything I want to watch on TV, so that wasn't really much of a plus.

I think of myself as a fairly civilized guy. I have a pair of shiny black shoes to go with my suit, if someone plunks down two forks on the left side of my plate I can usually figure out a use for both of them, and unless my knee really hurts, I stand up when a lady enters the room. But it didn't take long for all that to start slipping away when I was living by myself.

Who am I kidding? It didn't start to slip away -- it vanished like a vampire on a sunny day. On my first evening alone I had leftover birthday cake for supper, and I didn't even sit down to eat it. From that point on my meals went considerably downhill. The last 36 hours I lived on popcorn and bacon. I'm usually meticulous about getting the mail opened, sorted, and answered, but I had three days worth on the dashboard of my pickup and I had to force myself to answer the phone.

I'm pretty sure that if I'd spent another week alone I would have had a trench dug across the end of the driveway to keep out intruders, I'd be living on raw rabbit, and there would've been twigs and branches stuck in my tangled beard. Oh well. My wife comes home tomorrow and I'm fairly confident it'll be a while before she leaves me alone again -- and that's for the best.

But the bacon, though. The bacon was good.

Copyright 2009 Brent Olson