Day 1 April Blogging - Downsizing, Piano Lessons and More

When I read that Effy invited us blog for the month of April I got excited.  I do like to blog but don't always know what to say.  Like I said, I got excited.  Then the thought of having to think what to blog about for a whole month made me feel tired.  "I don't want to HAVE to blog every day" I told a friend.  I still feel somewhat the same way.  But I will try and not be too hard on myself if it doesn't  happen.

We moved last summer after downsizing from a 2 story house with a full basement into a one level manufactured home in an over 55 development.  It is lovely with a big clubhouse that has a library, a workout room and kitchen and dining.  There are monthly potluck dinners and special get-togethers.  We have a place to walk that is flat which is good living in the mountains. There is a lovely park and a library branch directly across the street. We love living here. Our other house was on top of a mountain and we got snowed in a lot during the winter.  We had 14 stairs to climb from the garage to the kitchen and that got old. Every time we come home from grocery shopping we are thankful we can walk right into the kitchen and not up all those stairs. Not only that but I have a washer and dryer right off the kitchen behind bifold doors.  I now LOVE doing laundry. No more hauling laundry up and down the stairs from the basement.

This "new" house was completely furnished including a piano. I've heard that it is hard to get rid of a piano these days.  We tried but no one wants to haul it away. So I decided to play. I have several boxes of music that I'd collected over the years that are still packed away.  But this wasn't how I wanted to play anymore.  A friend told me about a piano course on Udemy for only $9.  I thought that was too good to be true.  What a surprise though.  It is all about learning chords and how to play open chords, closed ones and how to change chords easily moving up and down the keyboard.  Then it goes on to explain and show how to add rhythm.  So different than when I was a child taking piano lessons.  I hated practicing so bad I spent that time standing in the corner for punishment. It wasn't fun. But playing chords is fun.  I had so much fun that I bought two more courses and I just play as I want, no "shoulds", no pressure.  Because the courses are online I can access them any time I want. 

The piano needs work.  It needs tuning and something was spilled on the keys.  I can use it as is.  I'm not sure who to call for an estimate yet.  I do have a portable keyboard though, so I will always have something to play on.

Too many magazines and books

500 Words a Day Day 24 April 1, 2015 Today I’m attempting to continue sorting out boxes in my office. My office is too small for all that I collect. I have too many books plus I have a guilty secret. I love magazines. Not all of them but Writer’s Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Dell Horoscope, The Mountain Astrologer, and oh yes, cooking magazines! It looks like I’m going to keep too many. How does one get rid of magazines they like? I think I’m going to sort through old Writer’s Magazines and be ruthless, hopefully.

Yes you see an adult coloring book here. I have another to color, they are angel pictures.


I came across a Woman’s Day from June 1958. It has a lot of short stories in it. Why stop publishing fiction? I remember trading these magazines with friends and neighbors. We would each subscribe to one and then when we finished reading them we’d trade with each other. I need to read the stories, look at the ads and articles before I recycle this one.

Back in the 1980’s I wrote stories from the Confession Magazines. They bought quite a few of mine and of course I kept all of them too. When we moved I packed 50 boxes of books and magazines and I don’t want to have to do that again. Maybe I’ll only have 45. Ha ha, I hope less. One of my CB “handles” was the clutter bug. I live up to the name.

Have you ever seen Reminisce magazine? It’s all about the “good old days” with pictures of old ads, memories, recipes and more. I try not to collect these but I found a pile in a box. I’ll try to glean the gems from them and hopefully toss them into the donate to the library box. Yes, our library has a table in the foyer filled with donated magazines. I donate as many as we can carry there but I go through them and take home more.

Another of my guilty secrets is People magazine. I don’t often buy them but I find them at the library or in waiting rooms. I brought a bag of them home last week and they’re still sitting by my chair in the living room. I’m looking forward to reading through them and yes, donating them right back to the library.

Thank goodness for the Zinio app on my Ipad. I can log into the county library and download them to the app and read them for free. The trouble is, the Zinio app is telling me I have used up my space and it’s going to close so I can delete some magazines. I don’t have any magazines downloaded. I need to look into this. I subscribed to the digital version of Dell Horoscope, True Story and True Confessions (yes I want to try selling some more stories there). I have the kindle app on my ipad too and I have so many books there that I’ll never run out of reading material. But I need to keep my hard copies of my astrology books, my Emotional Freedom Technique books, Tarot books and, sigh, too many more.

Back to work!