Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I'm going to try something here.  Even though I'm returning to the internets with scheduled blogging, I'd also like to significantly adjust my internet habits. I've called it detox before, and this is going to be similar. But instead of going out of my way to avoid specific websites, I'm going to try just...*not* being online that much if I can help it. I mean, I've done this before: closing down social media tabs for an extended time during the day and avoiding repeated temptations to open them back up. Doing my daily words and working on my blog entries instead of futzing around on YouTube or wherever.  Finding better uses of my time during the day.

I also need to start work on the revision of Diwa & Kaffi.  I'd like to take my time on this one, without a self-imposed deadline.  Added to that, I've woken up the 750Words again so I can start playing around with ideas again.  While it feels good to have a lighter work load writing-wise, I don't want to completely stop.  Starting next month I'll also be looking into finding more time for the music and the art. We'll see where this goes.

Lastly and most importantly: I need to get back on the exercise gig. I haven't so much been slacking off as I've been busy with a lot of different things going on. I plan on sticking to my gym promise of 2-3 days a week, alternating with walks through the neighborhood.  I also need to work on the diet as well...I'm starting to regain the weight I lost recently so I need to work on keeping it off, maybe even losing more along the way.  

Yeah, I know...I've blogged about this sort of thing before. Multiple times. Verbatim. Well, I'm okay with that. As long as I follow through as always, right?

Back from a week-long visit to New England to see family and friends.  Our return flight took off at 9:30ish ET last night and we finally landed in SFO at 1am, and we were in bed and out like a light by 2:30.  Did I still wake up at 7:30, as I always do on the weekend?  Yup.  Stayed in bed for another two hours, though.  Surprisingly not exhausted and reasonably awake.  Unfortunately our refrigerator is coming close to bachelor-level emptiness so we'll need to do some food shopping today.  Thankfully the half and half didn't go off so I could have my coffee!

The trip itself was fun -- saw a lot of people and went to a lot of places, took a good number of pictures!  The only real downside there was that I didn't get a lick of writing done!  I'm hoping I'll be able to get back on that horse starting today.  I did read a few chapters of Meet the Lidwells, something I hadn't done in one go for a while.  It definitely needs some revision, but all in all I think it's pretty good so far.  It's not my Huge Epic Science Fiction Story mode, and I'm kind of proud of myself for being able to write something so much lighter in mood (and word count!).  I'd say at this point I think I might actually be done by the end of October.  [Which, by the way, would be a record for me, taking 6-7 months to write a full novel instead of a full year.]  I'm also participating in Inktober this year (I'm posting the drawings on Twitter and Instagram), and with the exception of yesterday I've been right on schedule with that.

So how about that internet detox I was talking about a few weeks ago?  Yeah, well, that didn't quite go as planned.  I've been quite lazy about enforcing it.  I need to break the Pavlovian habits something fierce.  I'm hoping working on the Inktober drawings will break me of them.  Do I need to start muting a lot more things on Twitter?  Maybe I do.  [Not necessarily people, just subjects.  The avalanche gets overwhelming sometimes.]  We shall see how this plays out.

In the meantime, I'm hoping to get more stuff done today -- at least once A finally wakes up, heh -- and being that I have tomorrow off too, perhaps I'll be able to get caught up again.  I did a few mini-marathon writing sessions for my blogs before I left so I had them scheduled to drop at their regular times, and that came out quite well.  I'd like to continue with that, as it gives me more time to work on other things during the week.  [It also keeps me from writing overly long navel-gazing posts about things people may or may not be interested in!]

Hope everyone's having a good weekend!