My declining NYT habit.

I've just been catching up on the email and checking the blogs. I see Richard is doing some blogger meme that involves listing your five favorite things in six categories -- the five senses plus "kinetic sensation." I'm not one to take the trouble to try to come up with so many items. I mean -- what? -- for smell there's Play-Doh... but then what?

And then there's the creativity-crushing feeling of obligation to recognize loved ones: the smell of my wife, the taste of my wife, the sight of my wife, the sound of my wife, the touch of my wife, the kinetic sensation of my wife. Really, to make this meme any good, there ought to be a ban on mentioning family members.

Anyway, for sight, the one that springs immediately to my mind is: the sight of the New York Times on my front walk in the morning. [Make mental note to watch "My Dinner with Andre" again soon.]

For decades, I have begun each day at home picking up that blue bag, spreading the paper out on the dining table, and -- unless I'm rushing off to some oddly early commitment -- having my morning coffee while paging through the Times, reading whatever interests me (and doing the crossword). In the last year and a half, I've combined this habit with blogging. I've usually gotten the day's blogging going by commenting on two or three things in the NYT that have caught my eye.

But lately, I've gotten absorbed in reading things on my laptop, and the NYT has sat there longer and longer without my opening it. Today, I'm shocked to see that it's after 5 in the afternoon and I still haven't read more than a front-page headline. I'm not tired of it. I've been meaning to get to it all day. I'm just losing the habit.

The blogging habit -- which used to be merged with reading the paper Times -- has taken over the habit-space in my day.

UPDATE: Let me alert you to the existence in the comments section at the link of bickering between me and my ex-husband. It's rich, like good black soil.