Blog Rolling in Our Time

Earlier this week I turned into a domestic whirlwind. Made soup, made a salad with a recipe from the South Beach cookbook, vacuumed the whole house, scrubbed all the tiles in the bathroom. I even lifted the cushions of the couch and cleaned off the crumb magnet known as the bottom cushion.

It was getting painfully obvious that I was putting something off.

That something was writing a new post for this blog. Despite my original intention to treat this as a diary of my retirement, it changed once I let other people read it. It's one thing to write a diary entry for yourself - "Cleaned the house and read a book today" - but it is entirely different to write it knowing that some of your family and friends are going to be reading it. It seems to me it either requires a humorous way of writing about the mundane, or it needs spicing up.

Examples:

Humorous - "Cleaned the house because Linda said I would have to get a job at McDonalds to pay to have the house cleaned if I didn't do it." That's not true, but I know Jon, at least, will think it's funny.

Spiced Up - "Cleaned the house, read a book and started research on a historical novel about 19th Century Australian cowboys. Cannot decide if I should call it 'Lonesome Galah' or 'Bury My Heart at Wagga Wagga'." That's not true, either - and in fact I am stealing a real concept Matt is researching for a novel he plans to write - but at least it's more interesting than the plain facts of my day.

(Although the folks in North America probably won't have any idea what either joke is about. To help you, that's a galah in the picture at top. Wagga Wagga is just a place here with a funny name.)

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love doing this. For one thing, it has helped me - in a fairly structured way - t0 resume the type of writing which I hadn't done for years. In a real sense, this is the sort of exercise I needed if I were to ever tackle some seriously challenging writing project down the road.

But knowing that this is being read by family and friends has been the best part. It has proved to be a 21st Century way of connecting with people I care about. And the best part is when it's two-way as people either leave a comment at the bottom of a post or write or call me to react to something I've written. I suppose I should be a tad concerned that my most popular posts have to do with me stumbling, faltering, getting lost, or other examples of low self-esteem.

Of course, on the surface not every day of the retired life is rich with variety. Yet there have to be limits about how much people want to read about my walking, housekeeping, dieting, etc. So this blog has also made me look for new things to talk about, which must surely be a good thing for a person who today is most likely going to clean the house and read a book.