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Yes, I know…Long Time Between Posts….

I have finally retired from my extremely stressful, extremely time-consuming job and now I’m looking around at all the things I’ve wanted to do but didn’t have the energy to do in the last few years.

Blogging is one of those things.  I love to write and even if it turns out to be just a journal for me, I want to get back into the habit.

For instance just to get to this post it took me almost an hour to figure out how to login, then do all the updates I’ve been neglecting and now that I’m finally here figure out what I want to say.  Since this blog is about my Random Life, I guess I can say anything I want to on any subject that interests me at the moment.

Retirement is what interests me at the moment.   And how to suddenly live an unstructured life.  I keep finding myself trying to give it structure, making lists, trying to take care of everything at once, getting depressed because I can’t seem to accomplish the simple task of having fun.

That’s my new quest – how to live in the moment.  This takes me to my three life-long goals which I established in my 30’s more than half of my life ago.

  • Use My Mind
    • I’ve always done fairly well at this.  I’m curious, have a good imagination, many interests.  I want to know more about everything.  I don’t see that diminishing in this new phase of my life.  I have more time to read now.  I’m trying to mix it up with some non-fiction and some fiction, and divide the fiction between just-for-fun and the classics.
  • Enjoy Life
    • This is the most troublesome to me.  You would think this would be easy, but I honestly don’t know how to relax, other than distracting myself with tv or my favorite video game.  This is the single area I need to figure out most.  I’m always in the mode of what should I be doing now, so it’s really difficult to try to switch to what do I want to do now.
  • Maintain Financial Security
    • Not rich by any means, but I have done well enough here to allow my husband and I to go into retirement unafraid.  I enjoy financial learning and research but this is an area I have not spent enough time in during the last couple of years and now I suddenly have even more financial accounts to manage.  Doing okay so far, but got to make sure I don’t let this one slip out of control.

Well, that’s it for today.  Back to my mindless video game.

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My on-again, off-again love affair with writing

I have no idea how young I was when I started writing, but when I was 12, I wrote a comedy fiction series called My Summer as a Camp Counselor or How to Commit Suicide in Ten Easy Lessons.  My audience was my 6 year old sister and her friends.  They were very enthusiastic and I tasted the joy of writing for others and being well-received.

The only things I have ever gotten published (no payment) were a poem for a local newspaper about how stagnant our town had become and how we should look to a neighboring city for lessons on how to grow, and a satirical guest editorial for my college newspaper about how I decided to go to school  in Florida to escape the  cold North, and ended up freezing to death in an over-air-conditioned classroom.  It was called Little Blue Sandra.

In my late second childhood when I was in my 50’s, I took a creative writing class in the local community college and received a plaque proclaiming I was the most out-standing student in Creative Writing.  It was a fun class and I learned things.  Then my real life and my job started taking up all of my time and I didn’t even think about writing for a while.

Except that every now and then a phrase pops into my head.  A title. The name of a character and what it is about him or her that is interesting.  I see people waiting in line and before they reach the counter, I’ve given them a complete life history and hopes and dreams.  I feel I know them.  So far I’ve refrained from talking to them about it.

I miss being a writer.  But I worry about letting myself get too involved again.  I can’t afford to stay up until the wee hours of the morning just because the words keeping coming and I’ve got to write them down.  How am I going to get up at 5:15 so I can go to work?  So I just keep having those mental snatches of writing instead.

But writing is writing, whether you call it blogging or journaling, or emailing a friend.  The truth of the matter is I love words.  I love the way they feel in my fingers as I’m typing them out.  I love the sounds they make in mind, the visuals they create at the back of my eyes.  Someone once told me you don’t have to get paid to be a writer.  I guess that’s true.