Outside Interests?

A couple of months ago a man at church asked me if I had any interests outside of home and family. At the time I couldn't think of a thing. It was ridiculous, of course. I have plenty of outside interests. It's just that at the time child care and food prep (along with other homemaking issues) were all I could think about. All the same, when my friend Damon asked me to make a list of anything I could imagine myself doing to bring in a little extra income, I couldn't think of very many things to put on that list either.

I am an excellent secretary, so long as I am not expected to make very many phone calls. This was my downfall, and a source of constant stress when I was a legal secretary. I love paperwork; I'm pretty good at record keeping, too. Phone calls petrify me. I'll put off and put off the simplest ones--that is unless I make the call immediately I discover the need. I've had to make lots of phone calls about medical things recently because there was some delay in getting Isaac added to our health insurance policy. I'm getting better--having had to make calls for the attorney all the time helped--but it's still a struggle for me. Email and internet access to accounts has made life that much better for me.

I'm reading *Don Quixote* and *The Rhetoric of Fiction.* Surely that qualifies as an outside interest. I'm still writing, if sporadically. I think about things, various and sundry things, all the time. Just last week Michael and I had a discussion about the effect of advertising on the public, as we drove past a Quizno's bearing this sign: "Now Lower Prices."