Other distractions…

I’m not gonna build much of a following with a blog that I write in “once in a blue moon”!  I know it’s been more than two months since I wrote last.  And I know you are all “waiting with bated breath” for my next epistle!  Did you know that it is “bated” not “baited”?  It’s not about “fish breath” it’s about “reducing, lessening, diminishing” as in “holding one’s…”  It actually is an aphetic of “abated” (aphetic as in aphesis as in “The loss of an initial, usually unstressed vowel, as in cute from acute.”–The Free Dictionary online).  But I digress…which is one of my problems these days.

These days?  Maybe I have always been this way.  But I’d like to think it is more a sign of old age, how I get started doing one thing, in the middle of which I start doing another, in the middle of which I get caught up in another, and so on until I’ve–for all intent and practical purposes–forgotten what the first thing was that I was doing!  I tend to blame the current iteration of this sort of fruitless activity on the Internet.  That’s right, the World Wide Web! It is just too easy, too tempting, for those of us with the inability to resist to go off on wild goose chases (wow!  where would this post be without old clichés?!)  And this post is a fine example of that.  I was working on my current book (I actually have 5 or 6 in the works! See what I mean??) and needed to a bit of research on it by revisiting my CarePages blog from my stroke last year.  But when I started rereading posts by friends who were looking forward to reading my new blog (i.e. this one) I thought “cr*p!”  I haven’t written in that blog for so long…I wonder how long.  Which led me here.  And then I went off on more chases about the phrase “waiting with bated breath,” resisting the urge to also look up the etymology of the phrase “once in a blue moon.”  See?  Sometimes I can fight off temptation!

Now, where was I???