Category Archives: Writing

Bible study, Christianity, Documenting America, Screwtape's Good Advice, self-publishing, Writing

Too Many Things To Write

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So, the day after posting my writing goals for July, I started to have second thoughts.

In that post, I said my main project would be the next Documenting America series, Run-Up To Revolution. I started working on it yesterday, creating the Table of Contents and cataloging the source items already in the Word document. I turns out I only have five more documents to either find and copy or type. That’s a good start.

But is it the right thing to write? The last couple of days I did some more looking into Kindle Vella. For those who don’t know, that’s an Amazon platform for stories/books brought out in serial form. I thought maybe I could publish my nascent memoir, Tales Of A Vagabond, there. I have five “episodes” as K-V calls them) written, and a little inspiration caused me to start planning the broader book.

But wait, because that new Bible study I mentioned in a previous post continues to pull at me. I did a little research reading for it yesterday in the second source document, and a proposed outline has started to come together in my mind. Nothing is on paper yet.

But it also occurred to me that maybe I should return to working on the eight-part Bible study A Walk Though Holy Week. I’ve written about that before. Parts 4, 5, 6, and 7 are written, and Parts 4, 5, and 6 have had one editorial pass. These four could be ready to publish in a couple of months, Parts 1, 2, and 3 are fully planned, and Part 8 partially planned. It occurred to me that maybe I should shift to writing Part 1, for I don’t know if it makes sense to begin publishing the series at Part 4. What to do, what to do?

Then, our adult Sunday School class has begun re-studying C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. We went through it around 2008, and I wrote four chapters covering four letters. I found them useful in teaching fifteen years later, and I feel the itch to work again on it again. But, that would be quite time consuming and energy sapping. What to do?

And that’s not all. A couple of months ago, finding myself at the time of our critique group and me with nothing to share, I dashed off the first four pages of the first book in my long-planned-but-never-started Alfred Cottage Mysteries. The crit group seemed to like it, as they had liked the series summary I had shared earlier. I’ve wanted to write that series for a long time but have hesitated since it would be yet another genre—something I don’t really need.

And one other thing occurred to me. Perhaps it’s time to get going transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, as I did with the letters from our years in Kuwait. I want to get to that while I still have strength of mind and body. That’s not a commercial project; it would be only for family. But it’s important to me to see it done. I think, among all these things I’ve mentioned, it is the least likely to pop up to the surface at this time.

With all that, I actually have one or two other ideas floating around in my head, things that have come to me recently that haven’t gelled sufficiently to think of a title, an outline, or a purpose and scope. But they are there, consuming brain cells, and interrupting my reading on more immediately pressing projects.

Ah, the life of the writer with Genre Focus Disorder, too much immediate time, and too few years left in an already fruitful life to write everything that sits a while in my mind, never mind those ideas that flit through.

Bible study, Documenting America, goals, reading, The Forest Throne, Writing

June Progress, July Goals

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The Key To Time Travel is published.

How can I possibly have progress in a month that I was taking off from writing? Well, taking time off for me is different than for others. It’s hard for me not to keep up with writing even during my month off. So I got a few things done. I’ll list them along with the goals, then I’ll see what kind of goals I can set for July.

  • Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, as always. Even with grandparent busyness, I was able to get this done. Each day had a real blog post written and posted.
  • Attend writer groups meetings as I can based on travel schedule.  As expected, travel kept be away from all but one of the scheduled meetings.
  • Proofread as much as I can of the four completed volumes of A Walk Through Holy Week. I proofread parts 4, 5, and 6 (which I didn’t remember proofreading last year). Part 7 will be a July goal.
  • Work on the cover for the AWTHW series. I don’t sell enough books to pay for cover creation, so I just have to do it myself. I have a concept I want to use, if I can do the graphics. Which leads to my last goal… This is done, sort of. I worked with my 10-year-old granddaughter, who shows some artistic talent, to go from my preliminary concept to a working prototype. Whether it’s a fully workable prototype, I’m not sure.
  • Work with G.I.M.P. on how to do more artistry in covers. I’ll have to find some tutorials.

Other things I got done were:

  • Catching up on correspondence, both new writing and filing all unfiled correspondence for 2023.
  • Publish The Key To Time Travel. I didn’t mention this as a June goal because I wasn’t sure of the timing for getting the cover. After dealing with some health issues, the cover designer finished her work, and the book went on sale this month.
  • Work on the source material for the next Documenting America book. See the July goals.
  • Do more reading than normal.
  • Brainstorm an idea for a new Bible study, and read some source material for it.
  • Made a few updates to my website—not major ones, but things that needed doing.
  • And one thing that wasn’t writing related, but which I feel like mentioning, was digitizing my genealogy files. No, they are not done—far from it. But I added to what I did in prior months and fine-tuned my filing system as I went along. At the end of the month I felt good about how much of this I accomplished.

Now, for some July goals.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend two writers meetings, one of which I’ll present at. A third meeting may happen and I’ll attend, if the library can schedule them.
  • Work on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. Last month, even thought it wasn’t on the schedule, I managed to copy most of my source documents and load them into a Word document. The next step is reading and condensing them to the right length for the format of the series. I anticipate this will take all of July and possibly even longer.
  • Write up my recent Bible study idea into a proper outline of what it would be.

That’s a good number of goals for a month after a break. Documenting America will be my main task for the month.

book reviews, Writing

Book Review: Eats, Shoots and Leaves

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A cute title for a book on punctuation. Of interest to writers, but probably not many others.

I’m not sure where I picked up this little volume, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss. I think I won it at a writers conference. It’s a small hardback, 209 pages. What’s it about?

Punctuation.

The title comes from a punctuation error, though the author didn’t tell exactly where it happened. The writer, writing about panda bears, meant to write, “The panda eats shoots and leaves.” Alas, a pesky comma crept in, and it was printed “Eats, shoots and leaves.” The difference in meaning is startling, all from a misplaced comma.

Truss tells of several books on punctuation, going back to the 1700s.  She shows how acceptable punctuation came into use through what worked and what didn’t. Punctuation was for the purpose of giving readers clues as to when to take a breath, when to fully stop. It’s a British book, so deals mostly with the British way of punctuating. Truss does talk about the differences on the two side of the pond.

It’s a good book. Truss manages to make a boring subject quite entertaining. If you are a writer and need to get a better handle on punctuation, this should be helpful. It wasn’t so much for me. I can’t say that I learned much in it, other than something about how punctuation has changed through the years.

I give this 4-stars. It’s not a keeper, however. I’m either going to give it to someone at one of my writers groups, or put it in the donation pile.

miscellaneous, stock market, Writing

A View Looking South

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[Dateline 31 May 2023, for posting 9June 2023]

From my reading chair in the sunroom, looking south. It’s hard to tell, but I recently spent a couple of hours cleaning the window fan from years of dirt. Gotta be healthier.

Summer is here—maybe not by definition, but by the reality of temperatures. When I finish my morning work in The Dungeon (writing, stock trading), I go to the sunroom with either coffee or water, and read for an hour.

The sunroom is not air conditioned, and it gets hot in the summer. A time will come, in July and August, that it will be over 90 degrees by noon and more or less unusable. Right now, however, it’s around 80 degrees at that time. Each year I make an adjustment at this time. I swivel my reading chair around to face south, put a fan in the window just a few feet away, and make do with the air flow making the room fairly comfortable.

I made that change yesterday. I would have done it a little earlier, but the fan desperately needed cleaning. That took a long time, as I had to removed the grill (which turned out to be a pain) but couldn’t fully remove it due to some clips on one end. Thus, I had to reach my hand in between the spread grills and clean it as best I could. I finished that on Monday, and used the fan for the first time this season on Tuesday.

Now, when I sit there, I’m looking out the south windows a couple of feet away, rather than the north windows on the other side of the room. What do I see? Well, the chair is low enough, and the window ledge high enough, that for most of the view, all I can see is trees. Oak trees. Most of them with 12-inch or larger diameter trunks. They are dense. The canopy is fairly solid and very little sunlight penetrates it—that’s even after thinning the trees to make our woodlot somewhat park-like. If I raise up a little, I see more of the trees and trunks. The ground is lower, and falling away.

Except for off to the right. There the ground slopes up steeply. I can see the tree line at the edge of the woods, the grassy area between the trees and the street, and the asphalt strip of the street. The grassy area isn’t solid. It is punctuated by blackberry bushes that I’ve allowed to spring up. I can even see a small pile of cuttings from this morning’s yardwork, which I plan to move to a compost pile tomorrow.

Further away, across the street, I can see the woods across the street. A hundred and fifty feet into that lot is the fort I build with my grandsons, but it’s too far back in the dense foliage and I can’t see it from the sunroom. I know it’s there, but I can’t see it.

This new view means that I can no longer see the birdfeeder on the deck; it’s now behind me. However, today I noticed that I can see the birdfeeders reflected in the south windows. It takes concentration to look at the glass and see the small reflection instead of looking straight at the south woods. I was able to see birds come and go, but the reflection wasn’t clear enough to know what type of birds they were.

I have about a month more to enjoy the south view if temperatures are normal. It might even be a little longer than that, if I change my schedule and read in the sunroom before the heat of the day warms it beyond the edges of enjoyment level. Or there will be the occasional rain day, when I can use the room all day.

So what point am I trying to make? To change your schedule according to the needs of the moment? To enjoy whichever view life gives you? To observe the panorama of views that life gives you? I suppose all of the above.

Now in my fifth year of retirement, I’ve come to enjoy my noon reading time. I’m usually up at around 6:30 a.m. and in The Dungeon working by 7:00. With only a short break for breakfast, that’s close to five hours of writing or whatever work I have to do. Reading makes a nice break. The sunroom is nice venue. I have enough books in this house to find interesting reading material for the next 50 years—no exaggeration.

So I keep busy in the sunroom. At times I even look out at the windows and simply enjoy the view.

 

Bible study, miscellaneous, Writing

A Small View Between Obstacles

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Hard to see in this photo, but the gaps in the forest are there. I took this photo this morning, and the cloud cover is about the same as Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I came to The Dungeon as per my routine, mug of coffee in hand. I opened my current Bible reading book, which is the harmony of the gospels that I wrote, did my reading, had my prayer time, and got to my work—or maybe my busywork, can’t quite remember exactly two days ago. At some point I went upstairs for breakfast, then returned to The Dungeon and got to my real working time.

The day had dawned cloudy and remained so. At some point I looked up and out the window. Now, the window is covered with vertical slat blinds from the top to the floor. And my computer desk with the upper shelf unit is between me and the window. So two items are blocking my view of the outer world.

But I did have some view, enough to know the clouds were still thick. All I could see was tree leaves and branches. Once the oaks leaf out, which happens in the latter part of April, the holler behind our house is fully obscured. I see leaves close, a little light behind them, and then a mass of leaves that covers all else.

I took note that the leaves were perfectly still—not a bit of movement. But then I focused on the small amount of leaves deeper in the woods that I could see through the small gaps between the near leaves and branches. There, behind the front foliage, were places where gaps in the forest canopy allowed more light to penetrate. And in those gaps, I could see leaves and branches stirring. Eventually, that stirring worked its way toward the nearer leaves and branches, and they began to stir as well.

That got me to thinking of the limited view we have of the world. Our view is obscured by the things around us: the work at home, the work at a job, the need to keep in contact with people. So many things crowd our lives that, to use the old and trite adage, we can’t see the forest because of the trees.

It’s good to be looking for those gaps in what crowds us in to see beyond, to see what the rest of the world is up to. That’s what makes our little piece of the world a better place to live in.

When I took note of that movement in the forest, working from deeper in it to the edge of it made up of our back yard, I knew I had to blog about it, but how do I find meaning in it? Meaning, that is, beyond the gaps that allows us to see a little more of the world? And I thought of what I wrote not so long ago about friendship.

Friendships are the little gaps in the forest, with light penetrating the canopy and shining deep within. Friendships are elusive in this busy world, but well worth cultivating.

I’ve been working hard on my current work-in-progress, A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 5. I’m down to less than 1,500 words to go on the main text, plus some kind of introduction. My hope is to finish it today, though a doctor appointment may be too much interruption for that to happen. No matter if it does; I’ll finish it tomorrow. Then, I’m going to take time to cultivate some friendships I’ve kind of dropped while working so hard between writing and parent/grandparent duties.

Here’s to friendships, and to little gaps in the desk top-unit, the blinds, and the forest, that occasionally align and allow a view of the woder world.

Bible study, Writing

Miscellaneous Musings

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Every now and then, I come to a blog day with nothing much to say. I’m sure my few regular readers notice those posts. They are days when, for whatever reason, I’m knocked out of my regular routine, or I didn’t sleep well after not planning ahead.

Today is a little different. Rather than being knocked off my routine, I’m trying to reestablish it. After over two weeks or helping our daughter’s family in West Texas, we are back home and trying to get back to normal. It will be a short normal, as the helping times will come back fairly quickly.

Today I was up at 6:30 a.m. as always and in The Dungeon before 7:00. I caught up on a number of things, but blogging wasn’t on my mind. Getting back to writing was. Except I had some correspondence tasks to do first. Once those were done, it was time for the stock market to open and I had three trades I wanted to make. I lingered over those trades more than I had to. Next thing I knew, it was 9:00 and time for breakfast.

Consequently, it was 9:45 before I was back in The Dungeon and ready to write. My goal for the day was to get back into A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 5 after 12 days and make some progress on it. I didn’t have a specific word goal. Well, I got into it and made progress as I hoped. By 11:20 I had close to 1,300 words added and the next to last chapter completed. Only one chapter to go, and a little of that is done. Based on the word target I established for each chapter, I have maybe 4,000 words to write, plus the Introduction.

So I came here to An Arrow Through The Air and got to my other writing for the day. It’s a blah post, about writing progress. No earth-shattering ideas. No political rants. Nothing about things learned, ministries participation, or people helped. But it’s where I’m at.

And now, the sunroom and my noon reading break beckon.

Carlyle, Church History Novels, Documenting America, The Forest Throne, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

The Lasting Effects of “Genre Focus Disorder”

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I’m hoping that, by the end of the year, this will not be the only Bible study in my bibliography. Alas, I wrote that caption in 2022, and here it is 2023 and it’s still my only published Bible study. But I’m much closer to that goal.

Since early February, my main writing focus has been the Bible study on Holy Week that I developed. I wrote about it here. With a good writing day Saturday, reaching back to work on Part 5 (Part 7 being caught up), I got to the point where I can see light at the end of the tunnel on both Part 5 and Part 7. An introduction for the series, to go in the as-yet-un-started Part 1 also came to me this weekend.

Thus, it’s time to be thinking about the next thing to write. The second book in The Forest Throne series, The Key To Time Travel, is done, just waiting on cover creation. I will most likely give it the once over, checking to make sure the dates are correct. That’s a one-day task at most.

This was one of my two new publications in 2022. The sequel will be out within two months. When will I do the next one?

Somewhere around June 1, I will be looking to start something else—unless I take a month off from writing to do some major decluttering work, in which case July is the more likely date for writing something new. I actually started something else last week, the first volume in the Alfred Cottage Mysteries. That was mainly to have something to bring to critique group. I don’t know if I’m ready to begin work on it as yet.

But what do I write next? My Genre Focus Disorder (GFD) is so severe, I have any one of several directions to turn. I’ve spoken about GFD before, and if I can find the posts, I’ll put in a couple of links. It is a self-defined, self-diagnosed writing condition. It’s the inability to stick to one genre and build an audience in it. I’ve got it bad. I’ve met a few other writers with it, but I believe their cases are less severe than mine. Now that it’s time to pick a new direction to go in, what do I choose?

This was the last volume published in my Church History Novels series. When Ill I do the 5th?

I could write the next book in the Documenting America series. I have sold more in that series than any other. I did the reading research for the next volume, which will be titled Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, around two years ago. Hopefully my notes are comprehensive enough that I can jump right into the writing.

Or how about the next book in the Church History Novels series? I have four books in that complete. That’s my second-best selling series (which isn’t saying much). I know what the next volume will be about, though I’m not sure of the title yet. Actually, I know what the next three or four books in the series will be.

It’s been a long time since I wrote most of the poems in this, around 2005-6, I think.

Then there’s a book of poetry I’d like to write. It’s tentatively titled On Of My Wishes. I created the document last year and grabbed close to 30 poems from my “inventory” that will fit the theme. Alas, inspiration for the 20 to 30 others I need to write to flesh out the book hasn’t come. I’ve been so busy with prose, poetry is almost a distant memory. Could I rekindle the desire to write it, at least for one more book?

I could keep going with the Holy Week Bible study. I’ve completed Parts 4 and 6, and, as I said earlier, and very close to done with Parts 5 and 7. That leaves Parts 1, 2, 3, and 8 to be written. I could just continue on with them while that’s what’s been on my mind. Or, I have another ten Bible studies developed and taught, and a few more in development that would probably make decent books. Maybe that’s where I should go.

I have one Carlyle book published and two more started. And essays about him on my mind. It’s probably an obsession that I ought to get treatment for.

A couple of other non-fiction projects I started on are about Thomas Carlyle. One was a comprehensive, chronological bibliography. I’m well along with that, maybe 70 percent of the work, with the hardest parts complete. I pulled the document up Saturday evening to check to see if I had a certain of his compositions in it. I did, including documentation from his letters. Also, I began putting together a book about Carlyle’s Chartism, a pivotal work for him I believe. That may also be around 70 percent done, though I haven’t looked at it for at least five years. Why do either one of them, when the one volume about Carlyle that I edited and published doesn’t sell? Beats me. Mainly to complete unfinished projects. I hate leaving things unfinished.

A period of intense research is what led to this book. What will come of this new time of research?

Another thing that’s nagging at me is a genealogy book about my wife’s immigrant ancestor, John Cheney of Newbury, Massachusetts. I actually have much work done on it as far as research of his personal life is concerned. I researched, wrote, and published books about two of his descendants. I’d like to do a book about him, and maybe about four or five more about his children. This is more a dream, a hobby almost. Still, I’d like to get that done.

I could always stick with the Alfred Cottage Mysteries. They are cozy mysteries based on young Alfred’s genealogical studies. For some reason, I think they would sell. More dreaming, I guess.

One more short story to go in this already published collection has come to mind. Maybe that will be next?

And that’s not all that’s available for me to add to. The Gutter Chronicles could use a third volume. Ideas for series that I’ve fleshed out include The Waterville Dome, one about stock trading that’s partly planned, and…it seems that I’m forgetting something else. Oh, yes, the next two volumes in The Forest Throne series. The next one is partly planned out. And I haven’t even mentioned short stories.

See what I mean about Genre Focus Disorder? Maybe I do need to take that month off from writing, get some serious decluttering/dis-accumulation done, then see where to go. Whatever I decide, I’ll report it here.

Bible study, Christianity, Writing

Progress on “A Walk Through Holy Week”

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I’m hoping that, by the end of the year, this will not be the only Bible study in my bibliography. Alas, I wrote that caption in 2022, and here it is 2023 and it’s still my only published Bible study. But I’m much closer to that goal.

I don’t think I’ve written before about the Bible study I’m writing. I know I have in my monthly progress reports and goals. But I’m not sure I’ve done a post about it describing the project. The genesis of it goes back a few years.

I think it was around six or seven years ago that the co-teacher of our adult Sunday school class said he would love to have a class lesson series on Holy Week, going passage by passage through it, ending up with Easter. Based on the harmony of the gospels I had written, I told him that was something like 67 passages and it would take more than a year or continuous study to get through it all. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen.

But I brainstormed it and came up with a way to do it. We would take it in chunks over several years during the season leading up to Easter, commonly called Lent. Ten lessons or so over six years would do it. I suggested that to Marion, my co-teacher, and he agreed it would be a good thing to do.

So I made an outline of six years of lessons. The text would be my harmony. We began teaching it in 2019, covering the Triumphal Entry and teaching on Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week. In 2020 we covered the Olivet Discourse, mostly by Zoom because of the pandemic. 2021 was the Last Supper, 2022 the time in Gethsemane and the Jewish legal actions. This year we have moved on to Good Friday. Lent and Easter is over. We’ve had seven lessons from this part with three or four to go. That leaves Easter and the times after Easter to be covered in 2024.

We got through the first two years, and were in the midst of the third one when I suddenly realized that this might make a good Bible study to write and publish. So part way through year 3, I began writing the book for that year simultaneously with teaching the lessons. It was slow going at first. I wasn’t sure what I wanted in the books , how long they would be or even how long each chapter, corresponding to a lesson, would be. But I worked on it until the lesson series for that year was over, then put it aside.

Then last year, I decided to write simultaneously from the start of the lesson series and keep up with it. I found I could do this fairly easily. That gave a couple of days each week to go back and work on the lessons from the previous year. By the end of the then-current series, I was within a couple of thousand words of being finished with the volume.

Except I came upon a flaw in the series. The lesson series from year 1 was too long at 21 lessons. So was the one from year 3 at 14 lessons. So this year, during the “off season”, so to speak, I worked on the overall plan for the series. I realized that, even though we would teach it over six years, it worked better as an eight year series and eight book volumes. I also finished the little bit left in last year’s series over a couple of weeks.

Once again, I began writing the chapters simultaneously with teaching this year’s lessons. And it’s working. As of today, we’ve taught seven lessons and I’ve completed seven chapters. It’s gone fairly well, I think. I’ve also had time to work on the books from the third year, which in the new organization are books 4 and 5. Volume 4 is finished, and Volume 5 is about 12,000 words away from being finished. EDIT: Actually, Volume 4 wasn’t quite finished when I wrote this post. It is now, though, with one editing pass completed. [23 May 2023]

So Volumes 4 and 6 are finished. Volume 5 is nearing completion. Volume 7 is fully planned and is on schedule to be done in about a month. Alas, I haven’t started on Volumes 1, 2 and 3, and Volume 8. I likely won’t start until next year. The word count of the four volumes done or partly done is just shy of 110,000. If I keep writing lessons at the current length, the entire series will be between 200,000 and 250,000 words, or maybe even more than that, though I’m sure it will be less than 300,000.

So that’s the current project. I’m working almost exclusively on it. For the last several weeks I’ve been able to add close to 7,000 words each week. That will be my goal this week. Possibly next Monday I’ll report on how I did.

I haven’t figured a publishing schedule yet. I don’t know whether to wait a year and publish them more or less all at once, or to publish the ones I have done (Vols 4 and 6) now. I’ll decided that in a month of two. By that time, I may have Vols 4, 5, 6, and 7 completed. That would make more sense to publish them and fill in 1, 2, and 3 when I can get them done.

That’s too big of a question right now. I need to concentrate on the writing.

 

home improvements, letters, self-publishing, Writing

Thinking About Letters

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I made this presentation on Tuesday, but still haven’t put the stuff for it away.

When I came to The Dungeon this morning, mug of coffee in one hand and laptop computer in the other, I was greeted by a mess. Lots of writing related stuff strewn on my near worktable. A few stray income tax forms on the printer table (making me wonder if I forgot to put one in the packet I mailed to the IRS).

And also on my worktable, some things about letters. Three are notebooks that contain just a few letters, the ones I’ve been digitizing then discarding the originals. I need to consolidate them into one notebook and complete the process. Three notebooks to go to a thrift store, a little more free shelf space.

Somewhere, either on the worktable or possibly upstairs still, are the things needed for the presentation I did on Tuesday to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society. The topic was “Letter Collections: A Window on History in the Making”. The presentation went well, and we had a good number of people there. Now I need to get a number of books back on shelves and my notes somehow stored so that I can find them again should I ever need them.

Gary is gone, but the letters between us live on. A few edits to this are possible this month. Hang on, folks. It will soon be done and available.

Then, there was the book Letters Between Friends. I thought I had written about this before, but a look back on my posts indicates I haven’t. I guess that was because I wasn’t quite ready to announce this project to the world. And, actually, I’m still not. I finally have permissions from all copyright holders to publish the book, but I had a few redactions to do then reformat as needed. I also felt I should add an e-book, which takes some more formatting.

But I found my copy of it, before redactions, on my worktable. I need to find two hours of time for completing this project, then let people know it’s available. It will be of interest only to family members and classmates of the people involved. Perhaps 20 copies will be sold. I would consider that a success.

But when will I get to it? The two Bible studies I’m working on have consumed all my available writing time. And they will do so today. Somehow I have to carve out those two hours to complete that project.

And another two hours to complete what’s needed to get rid of those three notebooks. That may not take that much time. I should get to it. Right after supervising two workmen at the house today, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Right after the weekly grocery run. Right after finishing a letter to my oldest grandson. Right after…

…oh, where is my to-do list?

Oh, yes, I’m still reading that scholarly magazine article about letter collections. I should finish that today and dump the pixels back into the ether.

Bible study, Christianity, Health, miscellaneous, Writing

I Guess I Was Tired

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Here it is, Monday morning, 7:42 a.m. at the new Central Daylight Time, and I’m just getting around to writing my blog post. I didn’t get up until 7:02 a.m. today. I guess I was tired.

I taught adult Sunday school yesterday. That usually takes a lot out of me, both the preparation work and the teaching. I was exhausted as I made my way from the classroom to the sanctuary, and then as I sat through the church service.

When we got home, I ate our Subway lunch then put a roast on for supper. And off to the sunroom I went for my normal reading and nap time. I don’t always nap during these sessions, but I did yesterday. I like to take a walk then, but I was much too tired to do so. I went to my reading chair in the living room, where Lynda had a UFO program on. Just the thing to have in the background when you’re too tired to do much. I decided to forego my afternoon walk.

The next couple of hours are a blur. I caught up on e-mails. At 3:45 p.m. I added the veggies to the roast. I sent an e-mail to our Life Group with the prayer requests from the morning and the scripture we studied. I really can’t remember what else took up those couple of hours. But I did learn that I had left the charging cord to my computer in the Sunday school classroom. Alas, I won’t be going anywhere near the church this week. Well, I have a second cord I keep in The Dungeon, and fetched it. I can carry it up and down the stairs this week.

When the roast was done a little after 6:00 p.m., we ate, putting on a Miss Marple TV show, one of the ones from the 1980s in which Joan Hickson plays Miss Marple. When that was over, I pulled up on my computer the Bible study I’m writing, the one that my co-teacher and I are also teaching. I started writing on that around 8:30 p.m. or so, and when I stopped at 9:50 p.m., I discovered I had added 1,800 words, and was a little ahead of schedule on where I hope to be at that point in the week.

After that writing session was reading, putting pills together for this week, cleaning a bit in the kitchen, and to bed around 11:00 p.m., my usual time. I slept okay. Up several times in the night, but was able to get back to sleep each time. I woke this morning around 6:10 a.m., and rather than get up I decided to stay in bed until my normal 6:30 a.m. rising time. The next thing I knew it was 7:02 a.m. I never sleep that late.

But, of course, we changed this weekend to Daylight Saving Time. I lost an hour of sleep. It’s no wonder I was tired. It’s going to take a couple of days to fully adjust. And Saturday, I spent a fair amount of time pulling together our partnership income tax form. We trade stocks as a partnership, and that tax return is due March 15. That actually came together pretty well. I was able to complete and print the forms on Saturday. Today I will proof them and, assuming they are correct, make my copy and take them to mail today, two days early.

I also did some writing on Saturday, in the evening, on the Bible study as I prepared the lesson for yesterday. In that session I produced around 1,200 words. I think they were good words, but I’ll know more when I re-read them today at the beginning of my writing session.

So maybe I earned that tiredness. My blood sugar readings were good, as were my blood pressure. My weight is up a little as I’ve lost motivation to eat properly. I hope to get that motivation back today.

I think also the weight of everything I have to do this week was pressing on me. Tomorrow I make a presentation to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society (one of my clubs) on Historical Letter Collections, and I’m not ready yet. With banks failing this weekend, I know stock trading today will be intense. Wednesday are our annual eye exams. Thursday is Scribblers & Scribes writing critique group, and I have to decide what to prepare.

Oh, and this morning, I discovered that I also forgot my wireless mouse at church. It’s very hard to do my stock trading without that, and of course it’s important to overall computer use, so I guess I’ll make the 13 mile drive to church this afternoon and retrieve the forgotten items.

Obviously, I was tired.