Monday Update

Apparently, I'm not quite into the swing of being 'retired' again because I totally forgot to post yesterday.  Bear with me.  I'm workin' on it.

So, last week was my first full week of being back to being a private citizen / hermit again.  Here's what happened:

I wrote words!  Not every day, but I did manage to write twice for a total of 1733 words.  Not great but not horribly shabby either.  I learned that I am totally not up to any kind of marathon writing yet.  My hands start to be little, whiny babies at about 800 words right now.  That amounts to about a half hour of continuous typing.  I'm hoping that, by the end of July, I can be back to a sustained 60-90 minutes at a time. 

The story my brain wanted to work on was Duke Noble's.  I ended up restarting the next book in the series.  Right now, it's called Thicker than Water.  Once before, I started this story, and I may end up using some of what I wrote previously.  But since I got stuck, I probably needed to just jumpstart this sucker.  We'll see.  

I'm also working on getting back into the swing of reading.  I finished a Sherlock Holmes compilation and started a Hercule Poirot one.  Right now, I'm feeling mysterious... what can I say?  

On the activity front, I did something active 5 out of 7 days.  I'm not back to walking yet. There's so much other stuff I'm behind on that walking seems unproductive.  Instead, I spent time either cleaning or gardening.  Weight: 166.4

Cleaning is more exercise than you'd think.  And man, am I not used to doing it anymore.  I found muscles I forgot I had.  Oof.  It's not like Hubs wasn't doing it and doing a good job at it, but I'm a control freak sometimes, so as soon as I could take that job back, I did.  He's still doing dishes, but only because he gets to them before I think about it.  I did dishes once since I've been back and oh my aching back, I'd forgotten how much doing dishes hurts.  Oh well.  The job needs to shift back over to my list and get off of Hubs' list.  Jus' sayin'.

Gardening was mostly weeding and digging up beds because they are in such a state.  My poor shade bed... the astilbes are down from 6 to three and those were getting choked out.  I thought my two coral bells were toast, but one of them send out shoots and there are two little bitty live shoots from that.  The other variety is gone.  The lily-of-the-valley that was doing so good is left with one shoot that the deer have munched.  On a positive note, the tomatoes I planted a few weeks ago appear to be growing right along.  No signs on flowers yet, but I have hopes.

I made homemade cinnamon rolls on Friday.  I have had such a craving for cinnamon rolls like you wouldn't believe.  But I can't ever seem to find a recipe that makes me want to dive in.  Cinnamon rolls are such a pain in the butt to make, after all.  What I ended up doing it modifying my recipe for Tasty Buns.  I made the dough per the recipe, but then instead of making buns, I rolled it out into a rectangle, covered it in a butter/brown sugar/cinnamon mixture, and made cinnamon rolls.  They turned out super yummy.  The recipe ended up producing two pie pans worth or about 14.  Mmmmm.

Okay, I think I've bent your ear (bent your eyes???) for long enough.  Go forth and have an awesome day.  I'll try to remember to be back tomorrow.  How are things in your life?