Pastime

I was googling about for ideas for a post tonight. (Today I ran errands, wrote personal and business thank you notes, and prepared for tomorrow's Library board meeting. No stitching, no crafting, nothing to show, sadly.) And I ran across a list of 101 or 365 or 20 ideas for blog posts. Did you know there are whole idea generators for blog posts? Just click! (A silly-ish one and a more business-oriented one.)

You'd think, as a former writing instructor, someone who taught people how to generate ideas, I'd be a lot better at coming up with posts. Some of the techniques I taught were freewriting, clustering, um, some kind of thesis generator...wow, I stopped teaching a long time ago. I think the problem is that I'm just not spending enough time thinking and planning. I will tell you that this was the main problem my students had. In fact, almost all bad writing stems from not enough thinking and planning.

Anyway, somewhere out there someone said you should return to a favorite old pass-time and write about it. PASS-TIME? I like the hyphen. And sure it does sound like pass time when you say it, and it is something you do to pass time, but it's actually called a pastime. I always want to add a second "t" but that's just because I can't spell to save my life. I think of it as a past + time, so two "t"s. But if we consider that it is from Middle French passe + temps, we'll all remember that there's a t but only one of them.