Yeah, I know, two posts in one day. What can I say? I am feeling conversational this evening and none of the text message conversations I’ve been trying to start have really gone anywhere. So I figured why not write a second blog post just sharing some random thoughts about things on my mind?
As I mentioned previously, I am an introvert. I keep to myself a lot and am usually fine with that being the state of my life. However, every now and then my extroverted side awakens and I am more eager to start/engage in conversation, a lot more curious and generally more outgoing. So I end up in a mood like tonight where I am actively looking for people to talk with about nothing in particular. Usually if I start a conversation with someone it is because I have a specific reason to do so. I think the fact that the weather was so nice today plays a part in that as well. I hould have spent more of today outside. An 80 degree in April isn’t uncommon in South Dakota but an 80 degree today doesn’t mean it won’t snow on Wednesday. A few years ago in May I ran my heat and air conditioner on the same day because of the change in weather.
I really do hope the good weather is here to stay for a few months though I know better than to convince myself that it is a certainty. I don’t like snow for a lot of reasons but that’s only part of the reason. Last year when all of the restaurants closed for dining, a friend and I started to pick up food somewhere and then take it to a local park and eat at a picnic table. I actually ended up really enjoying that as something different and so want to do it even more this year. That also reminds me that I want to purchase a really nice lawn chair so I can sit outside more often. I don’t have a deck or anything like that so a nice lawn chair is a really appealing item if I want to spend more time outside. That might be something I look for when I get my stimulus check.
I am actually very much looking forward to getting my stimulus check on Wednesday. I have a pretty good idea of where most of the money is going to go. It won’t happen right away but it will eventually lead to a new computer. I also need to buy a new cane as mine broke a few months ago. Luckily, I haven’t really needed it in awhile. See, I don’t take my cane with me when I go to the grocery store (I always go with someone who can provide sighted guide) because I tend to buy a lot and need both hands free to move groceries into my apartment. And other than a couple trips to restaurants
and to a friend’s house I haven’t really gone too many places since Covid hit. So that’s how my cane could have broken and not really made that much of a difference on my life. I don’t know when it broke or how. My working theory is that it was the victim of my rumba one day. The Rumba was the major purchase I made with my first stimulus check and it was a wise investment. I don’t particularly enjoy vacuuming and didn’t really feel like paying someone to do it for me. So I gave the job to a robot and have no regrets.
Another good purchase I made recently was for an air purifyer. I put it in my bedroom because I was sick of waking up every day thinking I was sick because my sinuses were on fire. I can’t say that problem has completely vanished but things have improved. I will probably pick up another one for my living room in the near future.
I was looking at my email tonight when I had a thought.
Speaking of my living room, I am getting ready to rearrange mine. I haven’t done a room rearrangement since 2008 and the time has come. The first step is getting rid of things I don’t need that collect dust and take up space. This process has been ongoing for awhile but I still have a ways to go. I’ve got plenty of stuff in the living room and bedroom that I can dispose of to make more space and most of it is paper which is weird since I can’t read print. I have a pretty good idea of how things will look when it is all said and done and have discussed the matter with my friend who will help me move things when the time is right. I also told my mom when I talked to her on the phone this morning that she could bring me the trophies and plaques that I won in the past from her basement. I don’t have that stuff now because I don’t dwell on past successes but since she is eventually going to move that stuff would need to be dealt with eventually so I figured why not have it now? I’ll hang up some of the plaques I got from debate for people to look at when they come visit but it isn’t as though I get many visitors. That is what they call a segway and I am going to use it for its intended purpose and go to the next topic.
I wish that my love life were even 1 percent as interesting as the horoscope emails that flood my inbox suggest it is going to be. I always get an email about someone admiring me from a far or an ex wanting back in my life or how my relationship is really going to pick up steam or some other thing that is usually positive sounding will happen. Reality has different ideas, however. I plan to write a more detailed post about this but it seems no matter how hard I try or sometimes don’t try nothing ever really changes and I end up frustrated and arguing with myself as to whether or not it is even worth trying to find a healthy stable relationship with a woman? There was a time when I wasn’t what you would call happy to be single but I was at least able to deal with it. It was after I dated someone briefly wwho while a nice enough person was not my type in any respect and I wasn’t hers either. It told me that I’d rather be in no relationship than a pointless one but that feeling has passed. I don’t want a pointless relationship but I’m unhappy with the status quo. But dating isn’t the only thing in my life that hasn’t happened recently.
March was noteworthy because I did not read a single book. In fact, I haven’t read a book since the middle of February. There was a time when I was regularly reading 10 books a month and even hit 35 in July of 2018. My reading fell off considerably last year and this year things don’t seem like they’ll be much better. I’ve got plenty of year left to turn it around but right now the enthusiasm isn’t there. What I have realized in this situation is that it is best to just ride it out. I don’t want to force it because then reading is a chore not a fun activity and I don’t want it to be like that. I viewed reading as nothing more than something I had to do when I was growing up and wasn’t the better for it. I will eventually pick up another book but I may have to consider the possibility that my days of reading a hundred books or more in a year may be gone for at least the time being. However, all hope is not lost. In April, one of my favorite authors, Jack Carr will be releasing the next installment in his series that started with ‘The Terminal List’ and I am excited for that and so it is highly unlikely that I will read zero books for two straight months.
One reason my reading is down is because my TV viewing has gone up. I think I switch between the two in phases. There’s never a period where I have balanced my book reading and TV watching evenly. I run hot and cold one both of those things and right now I’m more interested in TV. Of course, I’m more interested in old TV than I am current TV and watching a documentary show like Swamp People or The Universe at night as I drift off to sleep has replaced listening to a book.
Last month, I got iTunes to tell me how many hours of TV shows I have downloaded to my external drives. I am at pretty close to 7000 hours collected over the past half dozen years or so though most of it has been acquired over the last three. This is another one of those things I will explore in a future post but I much prefer owning what I want to watch over recurring payments to Netflix or Hulu. I’ll sign up for a streaming service that has something on it I want to see, watch that show and then cancel at the end of my term until the next thing rolls around. I had Netflix for most of 2020 and if not for the fact that I shared an account with a friend who actually did watch it, it would have been a complete waste of my money. I subscribed to Netflix and then just kept watching the things I owned on iTunes.
I mentioned this on my Facebook page but thought I’d share here as well. It isn’t unfair to call me a creature of habit although I have been far more willing to change things up over the past year or so. But last night, I ordered a pizza from Godfather’s. Then I remembered that I had also ordered a pizza from Godfather’s on April 3, 2020. Hey, it is weird the things that I remember or how I remember them in the first place. And I’m pretty sure that my order last night was remarkably similar to the one I placed in 2020. I didn’t intend for ordering pizza on April 3 to be something I did every year but if I do it again next year then it is clearly a pattern.
I have written enough for today. Hopefully, somewhere in this entry I said something you found compelling. If you made it this far without that happening then I commend you for making it to the finish even though I didn’t say anything interesting. I have a post all ready to go for tomorrow. It has been written and edited and just needs me to hit publish. It is about the biggest news I have received so far in the year 2021. So if you didn’t find this interesting, maybe you will find that one moreto your liking. Until then, stay well.
Random Catastrophe Version 3.0 