Can I post photos, though?

This is a test post, my dears. I have this iPad, you see, and it has ever so many photos on it, but so far it hasn't let me actually post them to my blogspot. This app promises it will help. So, with luck, I will be able to post a few photos of, oh, how about Christmas baking?

Or the bird that crashed into our window?

Okay, allegedly I have two photos, which are sitting at the bottom of the screen. How do I get them into the actual blog? I may have to hit Publish and see what happens.

ETA: On another computer, and not using the blogger app, I have moved the pics from the bottom of the post to the correct places within the text.

the arthritis thing

I'm sticking with semi-denial that I have rheumatoid arthritis. Not the sort of denial where you refuse to take meds, but a surface denial because I seriously do not want to give up having palindromic rheumatism (best disease name ever, with spastic colon a close second) in favour of something as plebian as RA.
But yeah, on the medication side, I'm back on the 'anti-malarial that used to make you blind but probably doesn't anymore but get your eyes checked anyways', while still taking the 'chemotherapy drug that may cause liver damage, anaemia, pulmonary fibrosis but probably not in the dosage you're taking'. And I hardly ever have to take the 'anti-inflammatory that may eat your guts out'.
I'm now taking two drugs that disallow alcohol, so my 3 drinks a week probably has to drop to 1 (so it had better be a good one, like B&B or port). I feel oddly rueful about this, as if I'd wasted my non-medicated years when dammit I could have gotten staggering drunk! Of the things I've thought I might regret, getting staggering drunk has never before made the list. (Alas for my well-spent youth! I don't even know how to get changed in the front seat of a car.) Not puking drunk, because I figure migraines are a fairly accurate simulation of a hangover.
I asked my doctor whether I should still eat foods that are supposed to boost your immune system. My immune system hates me and wants to see me suffer, so shouldn't I be trying to beat it down with diet as well as medications? But no.

I don't want to sound all whiny, because a) the drugs are working because I can move my hands and so on, with only occasional little twinges and b) no noticeable side effects, despite the long scary side effects lists.
And since a few months ago I was chatting with two different SCA friends, both musicians, both with RA and both only getting anti-inflammatories for it--nope, no call for me to be whiny.

My real purpose in posting is to direct you to the bloggess's posts about arthritis, about which she is much, much funnier than me. Actually, about anything, especially the giant labia.

Things that are not writing

Blogging is a kind of writing, but I can't really consider it a productive kind of writing. Perhaps a way to work out questions and issues before they go into the narrative. In which case I beg your pardon, Gentle and Hypothetical Reader, for talking to myself in front of you.
Research is not writing, but for me it's a necessary, even vital, prelude to writing. I can't make something up out of whole cloth. I have to have a strong idea what is possible within a particular setting, and I can't know that without research.
Critiquing is not writing, but it may improve one's writing skills, simply because it's much easier to see an error in someone else's work. Then one asks 'Am I doing that too?' The struggle to express an opinion or make a suggestion in a manner both clear and kind is a useful exercise in itself.

The risk with any of these is that they become valuable in themselves, and eat time. Writing time must already be squeezed in here and there between paid work, travelling to and fro, housework, time with family and friends. Every activity that chips away at writing time is a risk.
So it's the old weighing of risks and benefits thing. Keeping up with my online friends, particularly those who are also writers, is important to me and helps me keep my perspective.
Reading Fandom_Wank, on the other hand, is hard to justify on any basis other than snarky entertainment. For a while I read FW after every phone conversation I had with a particular friend, just to cleanse the choked-up snarkiness from my system.

I'm weighing the risks-and-benefits of having a website while being unpublished, you see, and this is me dancing around the question. It would make for something a Hypothetical Agent could look at, which is both a risk and a benefit, ratio depending on the lameness level of the website. Maintaining a website (and they're no more useful unmaintained than they are 'under construction') is another thing that chips away at writing time: a definite risk.
Partly I feel that my setting up a website, as if I were some sort of real writer, is the sort of hubris that merits lightning bolts or divine humiliation in short order.
Then there's registering a domain name. Common wisdom is to register one's own name or writing name. Common wisdom is not named after a popular comic-book heroine, though. I'm sufficiently fussed about that aspect that I've considered choosing a pen-name, even though I quite like my real name and it's at a convenient part of the alphabet, not likely to be shelved close to the floor and inaccessible save to the young and limber. Part of the fear may be due to the trauma of grade 7, when I was greeted regularly by my classmates with a chorus of daduh-daduh-daduh-daduh-BATGIRL!