I think it's good to get out of the house once in a while. Sounds patently obvious, but it can be hard to put into practice.
Today it was easy: I had to bring the Prius in for maintenance. I warmed up with half an hour of yoga on Wii Fit, washed, dressed, and drove down to Burnsville. The Toyota dealership has decent recliners in the waiting room, and I only took two chocolate chip cookies and a cup of coffee as I stretched out and listened to some Penny Arcade podcasts. They're not producing any more podcasts, unfortunately: only they and Ricky Gervais have ever made me laugh out loud.
I got a couple ideas for short stories so I foraged around for a business reply card and scrawled them out in my backhanded automatic writing script. You would never guess I practiced calligraphy for a year. i'll develop these ideas soon, I'm excited to get new story ideas. For my Creative Writing classes I've been plundering the stacks of dilapidated notebooks I've been hauling around from apartment to apartment. When I was in college, and before my depression was diagnosed, I used to write down manic, wild story ideas that wouldn't stop coming. Rarely fleshed them out but that's what I'm doing now: stealing from myself.
Currently I'm writing from my apartment, and I'm only picking and choosing which blogs I'll update. That's my writing exercise, you see, updating a dozen blogs. It forces me to approach the same topic from several perspectives or come up with a dozen unique ideas. But when I'm at the cafe, I'm more inclined to fill them all out: it feels like a special treat to go out and sit in a wi-fi cafe, hacking copy out like an updated William S. Burroughs in Morocco or something. (I do have a travel typewriter, as a matter of fact.) And to fully indulge in this special treat, I'll write in them all, but I don't feel the same impulse when I'm at home. It feels like I only need to write in the important blogs and can let the rest slide.
I'm not going anywhere with this. I just noticed it and had to remark upon it.