I’m often asked what I do when I’m not writing. It’s a hard question to answer because what I did this week isn’t the same as what I did last week, and next week will be different again. Oh, some things are consistent. I read. I walk my dog and take care of my cats. I spend a lot of time answering mail.
Here are a few things that I’ve done in the last seven days:
1. I bought a new digital camera. That was the easy part. The hard part, for me, was figuring out how to transfer the photos to my computer and how to e-mail them. My first photo was of Flat Stanley, who is visiting me and reporting his adventures to a school in Lincoln, Nebraska. After sending Flat Stanley’s picture, I spent an hour on line looking for a way to recycle my old digital camera, which no longer works.
2. I went to the dentist and then met my grandson and my son-in-law at our favorite pie place. It didn’t seem quite right to go straight from getting my teeth cleaned to eating pie but Eric and Kevin happened to be in Enumclaw, where my dentist is, at the same time I was and I can’t pass up a chance to see them – or a chance to eat pie. I had blueberry almond crunch, and it was delicious.
3. I had a chimney sweep come to clean my chimney. There was much barking by Lucy when the chimney man walked around on the roof.
4. I was interviewed by two high school students who are making a video about Jonas Salk to enter in a National History Day competition. We met at the Issaquah WA library and did the filming in a conference room. The students had watched the PBS special on polio this week. I saw it, too, although it was extremely difficult for me to watch the segments that showed children receiving the Sister Kenny treatments. Even after all these years, such images fill me with dread. The memories of polio remain strong.
5. Today I baked brownies and made a broccoli salad to serve tomorrow when friends come to dinner. I cut the thick broccoli stalks into chunks and threw them in the grass off my back porch. Withint ten minutes, a Blacktail deer came to eat them.
6. Lucy and I did a litter walk in my neighborhood to pick up trash, mostly beer cans, that had been tossed from car windows. I live in a beautiful wooded area and can never understand why people are willing to spoil that.
7. I listened to the Audio Bookshelf recording of “Escaping the Giant Wave” and I have to admit I enjoyed it.
As you can see, my life isn’t much different than the lives of other people except that during my working hours, I write. I also think about my writing even when I’m doing other things. As I drove to the video interview, for example, I thought of a new plot twist for the book I’m working on, and I had to pause in the middle of chopping broccoli to jot down an idea for a possible future book.