What I've been doing instead of blogging

Wow, it's been a month since my last post? Are you serious?

I knew it had been too long (my smirking, goody-two-shoes, inner faultfinder has been calling it to my attention regularly), but I didn't realize a whole month had passed.  I've been busy doing other, non-fascinating things:

Medical stuff.  Making an appointment,  going to the lab for blood work, and going to the doctor.  Because if I didn't, I couldn't refill my prescriptions again.    Standing in line at Walmart to get prescriptions filled, not checking the prescriptions until I got home, even though I realized they cost more than usual.  Discovering after I got home that one of the prescriptions was for twice the usual dosage -- which made it five times more expensive.  Calling Walmart and finding out that once I left the store with the wrong prescription, they wouldn't take it back.  And because the error wasn't the pharmacist's, there was no adjusting the price, either.  Learning lessons the hard way.

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Counting carbs.  Cutting sugars and starches out of my diet. Boiling eggs, scrambling eggs, frying eggs.  Realizing, once again, that I don't much like leafy, green vegetables. Scouring the Internet for low-carb recipes. Learning to love rotisserie chicken.

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Refinancing the house. Mortgage rates are so much lower now than they were when we bought the place 13 years ago that it seemed foolish not to try to refinance.  But, ohmigosh, the paperwork!

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Taking Kadi and Butch to the vet.  One at a time.  That's two trips into Baton Rouge.  Two hours of total driving time.  They needed their annual checkups and shots. Both of them are doing pretty well, "considering how old" they are.  Each of them is dealing with age-related issues, with which I completely identify.  Spoon-feeding them, still.  Who knew they'd take to this idea so eagerly?  They deign to take an occasional bite from their dog dish on the floor, but they get jump-up-and-down excited when it gets close to suppertime. Loving them, 24/7.

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Cutting my own hair.  It's getting harder and harder to get the back even, and the pile of clippings gets grayer with every cut.

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Genealogy.  I never get tired of snooping the trail to track down one more long-gone ancestor.

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Reading other people's blogs.  And checking out news sites, reality TV gossip sites, puzzle and game sites.

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Keeping up with family and friends on Facebook.  You think I'm bad about blogging? I almost never post anything on FB.  But I do enjoy reading what my daughters, grandkids, sister and nieces are doing.

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Reading new books and rereading old ones.  I spent a glorious few days living a horrible existence Under the Dome in a Maine town full of characters born of Stephen King's imagination.  Then I moved south to Mississippi (and back in time to the 1960s) to get acquainted with the patient ladies who were The Help.  Still time traveling, I lived in the Tennessee plantation-home-turned-Union-Army hospital with The Widow of the South. 

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Keeping up with my favorite TV shows. These days I check the television schedule days in advance and set up the DVR to record the shows I enjoy. Fast-forwarding through all those commercials saves me lots of time.

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Playing Sudoku and Mahjongg on the computer for way too many hours.

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Visiting all the houses I've lived in on Google Maps Street View.  I hope the people who live in this home now enjoy it as much as we did in the late '60s.

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Taking photos while Kim melted glass for the beadmaking tutorials she's been writing.  This has been a fun photography project.  

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Editing photos in Photoshop Elements.  I can easily pass a whole day playing with my pictures.  Or even just enlarging them and looking at them, really.  It isn't the photos that I love so much; it's the subjects of them.

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Making music.  If you can call it that.  I've never had a lesson, but I've learned to pick out a few songs on this old keyboard that was a gift in the mid-1980s.  I've also learned to ignore the many false notes I hit; they do not count.  The keyboard lives near my back door these days, and when the dogs go outside, I indulge my inner Liberace while I wait for them to come back in.

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Listening to music.  All those activities above that are done on the computer? They aren't done in silence.  I was given several iTunes gift cards last year, and I've put them to good use.  Music has always been an important memory trigger for me, so it's been fun to create playlists of songs I've loved through the years. As for new music, I find most of it on TV and movie soundtracks.  When I hear a song I like, I jot down a long string of lyrics, Google the lyrics to learn the song title, search for the song title on YouTube until I find out who sings the version I like, then order the song on iTunes.  That'll work until the gift cards run out.

Sometimes I like to pull up a list of all my iTunes songs, scroll up and down the list several times with my eyes closed, then stop scrolling and click the mouse to give myself a musical surprise.  Whoooeeee, there's a lot of spice in my life!

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So that's it.  That's where I've been.  Not very much to blog about, is it?