Laughing from my sickbed starts...

In the past year and a half I’ve learned how to navigate the Internet, somewhat, finally!  It’s all due to my family’s latest effort to drag me, yes, kicking and screaming, into the 21^st century, this time with an iPad.

I call it the “idiot pad,” because surely it had to have been invented for those like me who absolutely fear computers. Or are constantly breaking them.  But more on that later.

I started, after a few months of leering at the iPad with disdain and suspicion, to fool around with the darn thing.

Oh yeah.  I missed a biggie here.  I’m basically a bedridden person.  So the idiot pad was perfect for me in that too.  I didn’t have to get out of bed to rediscover the world of the Internet.  Yes, I could get out of bed some days and try to communicate through computers which I feared and broke on a regular basis, but my brain was then so fogged up that it was a truly painful and awful experience for all.  In bed with my iPad, I could actually think!  And I love to think.  It’s actually one of my hobbies, sometimes to my family’s dismay.

But this blog is not going to be just about being sick.  Frankly, I try to hide my illness from the world, often successfully.  People tend to think I’m simply a hermit.

I, in turn, discovered Facebook.  Actually, if truth be told, I was forced to discover it, but that too is another story, for another time (hopefully!).  As I found friends from my past and formed a few new friendships, I now heard a new message from them.  For years and years people would say to me, you need to write a book!  Ugh!  I’m not up to it.  Now I was hearing, “you need to write a blog.”  Me: what’s a blog?  (I told you I was dragged into the 21^st century but you didn’t believe me, did you?)

Then after ordering books from Amazon on blogs – but never reading them – I thought, no blog!  I’m much too private a person for that.  I mean, I was upset when the number of people I’d friended on Facebook reached 13, then 20, then 25.  I kept having to up my “no more than” number.  I’m up to 40 now and that just about makes me break out in hives.

But I think the time has finally come to start a blog, or to at least try to start one and see where it goes.  I stumbled over one blog a couple of weeks ago, A Model Recommends, from a British model who’s just so sweet and funny, writing about beauty, skincare, all sorts of the fun things I do love.  In secret I’m a bit of a beauty products junkie, though not successfully since I….  Well, more on THAT later too!!  I thought to write to Ruth, our model, to see if she’d consider adding anything at all for those of us with, ahem, shall I say “slightly more mature skin?”  Well, I discovered, almost all on my own, that her mum had started a blog too!  What fun.

I then desperately wanted both of them as my buddies and that’s when I realized that if I didn’t want to become some sort of stalker crazy person, it may be best if I just go and try my own blog.  Even my hubby, who must win some sort of award for being a privacy nut, keeps saying I need to write a blog!  And I’d also just realized that you can learn everything and anything you want on YouTube, so inadequate computer skills were no longer a legitimate excuse.  (More on that later on too!)

And so I am going to try this new social experiment.

Most of all, I love to laugh and I love to make other people laugh.  No, not in a Billy Crystal or Joan Rivers way (can you tell I have the Oscar’s on my mind?) but in a funny next-door neighbor sort of way.  So, I do hope this blog will be funny or add a chuckle to your day.

And I love to read…in fact, I‘m a bookaholic but due to a few crises in the last couple of years I’ve, for the first time in my life, not been able to read.  But I am starting to regain that concentration, so there is hope.  I belonged to a small book club I co-started in our small town when my oldest was in 3^rd grade (she’s 32 now and is a teacher with her own self-contained autism classroom – forgive a mom for bragging!) and this was before anyone had even heard of a book club, even Oprah.   But we fell apart after about 15 years once retirement started in, as well as politics creeping in….

So, books, yes.  Politics, no – not in this blog.  Fun, yes, seriousness, yes, at times, as in how to live more easily with chronic illness, tips and so forth.   Books, a bit of history…how, even, to get more sleep, a biggie for all, I’m discovering, much to my dismay.

Beauty, yes!  Fashion, yes!  Gardening, yes!  Cooking, yes!  Travel.  Being a mom, a wife, a best friend, yes, yes, yes!  Even a bit…ok, perhaps a LOT, of musings.  Certainly ramblings, which I’m so famous for, will unfortunately, find their way into this too.

But most of all, all with a bit of laughter.  It helps cover a multitude of sins and helps ever so much to get us through whatever problems any of us are going through!  Such a cliché, I know, but there you have it….

So, kick up your feet and join me in what I hope will be my new adventure!

All best,

Upa