Why Grown Children Are Good: The day comes when they are old enough and employed enough to shower you with gifts on appropriate occasions. (In our family that's pretty much Christmas and birthdays - we generally don't do the Hallmark Card Holidays.) So anyway, another birthday gift showed up today, from, as the card was signed, "Your favorite daughter" (also my only) - not one, but two DVD sets - The first seasons of The West Wing and Northern Exposure. That's on top of the Sephora gift card that showed up yesterday. I'm swooning!!

And it's so appropriate, because as today is the last day of the month and the beginning of a "new year" for me, I woke up this morning thinking about what needs to change in my life. My year of just doing whatever I damn well pleased after my husband died is almost up, and not that I intend to quit doing whatever I damn well please, but now is the time to put a stop to bad habits I've developed as I've adjusted to living alone.

Item one: I need a 12-step program to get me off this damn computer. I spend too much time online - I have for years, and while my husband was sick it was a sanity saver and an escape, but now it's a time eater, and I need to wean myself from reading my various haunts EVERY day, and updating this blog every day. I'm in a rut - I come home drained after a brain-frying day at work and I - and this is the insane part - sit down in front of another computer, and it eats big chunks of my evening. What am I thinking? Actually, I know what I'm thinking - I'm thinking I can count the TV shows worth watching on the fingers of one hand, I hate reality TV and don't give a flying rat's ass about who The Bachelor will propose to or the next manufactured fake celebrity on American Idol so I often flip aimlessly through the TV channels. And sometimes I do end up in IM conversations with the Girlchild, less often now that she's working again, but of course, that's what telephones with headsets are made for, so one can talk while using one's hands. So there are alternatives to sitting here, and I am going to seek them out.

It takes 30 days to change a habit, or so they say, so during the month of July blog updates will be far less frequent but, I hope, more substantive. More pictures would be nice. More pictures of finished objects would be nicer. Pursuing other interests I've talked about, thought about, but have been too lazy to do anything about would be a nice change.

This isn't a farewell to the blogworld, or even a formal hiatus, just a warning that I'm going to make myself somewhat more scarce. I certainly can't go cold turkey on the computer, because I use it for mail, banking, shopping, news, you name it, but I can limit my online time to morning coffee pre-walkies only, and spend my evenings in other pursuits.

And I have to confess, I do look at my stats. I'm somewhat stunned by them, because even I think I'm boring a lot of the time, but I know I got lured into posting more just because I felt like there were regular readers who would be "disappointed" if I didn't. (Of course, considering the lack of content lately, they may have been disappointed when I did!) I'm fascinated with having a "readership" out there - that's what makes blogging so much more interesting than keeping a journal. I already know what I think, but I apparently have an insatiable need to tell other people what I think, at least on the issues that are fit for public consumption, so I'm not going to stop blogging. I like it. I just need to manage my time and balance my life better.

And now the Girlchild, not knowing about these ruminations, has intuitively gifted me with hours of viewing pleasure to lure me to the couch, the Ott light, and a fiberly project. What timing! She definitely is my Favorite Daughter.