Started work today! Job is scanning documents at a local utility company. Supervisor seems nice, competent, and a good communicator - and her philosophy seems to be to give me the tools I need to get the job done, and then leave me alone, which I like.
I've started reading 'Dune' and 'Under Wildwood'. An LJ friend's post reminds me that I've been wanting to re-read the 'Little House' books, so those may be next on the list. I'm focusing on taking my time with the books, too, and reading at a careful, deliberate pace.
And then there's writing. I've written just two stories that I'm really happy with, and those were in the period 1998 - 2000. ("The Zero Ring" and "The Rose of Paradise".) I've spent a lot of time wondering what was different for me then, and why it's been so hard to get that creativity back. But one thing is that I wasn't on the net then; I'd taken a hiatus for a couple of years, as a lifestyle choice.
(I was one of the zillions of people who signed up when AOL saturated the planet with its floppy disks, and to this day my email account is with AOL. But when I split from T in 1998, I made a decision to go off the 'net for a while. I remember thinking with some satisfaction that I didn't have to worry about the dreaded Y2K bug! And I didn't have internet at the time of 9/11, either; I think I finally went back to it around 2002 or 2003 when I enrolled at Portland State and it was obvious I was going to need internet to function effectively in school.)
I'm not about to "give up" internet again, but I do think cutting back will be a good thing. When I do go online I'll have a clear sense of what I want to do, rather than just spodding around. And I'm not planning to give up LiveJournal, in fact I may end up posting more at LJ rather than less; LJ is geared to people who like to read and like to write, and I like that.