Disappearing blogs and artisan bread

I could swear that I had typed up a few blog entries. Yet no, they seem to have all disappeared. Well probably I am technologically challenged and I did something wrong. I will start again.
Here I am, two years post retirement, and none of that free time I thought I would have, has surfaced. What happened?

• My house is cleaner, I can't deny that. 
• I am more well-read although I still have a pile of The Economist to get through and they keep sending me a new one each week. Aaaaaggh. Lots going on: first Libya and Egypt, and now Syria and Greece about which to stay informed. 
• My laundry basket gets emptied right down to the bottom when it is laundry day. 
• I spend about the same amount of time on email and the Internet as when I was working.

Where does the extra time go?
Well, one way is that I am baking bread. (huh?) Yes, learning to bake was one of my goals and something I thought was intimidating. It turns out that it is not hard to do by hand, and is somewhat therapeutic the smacking around of a lump of dough. But. . . you cannot get out of it once you have started and you need to hang around while the yeast is rising, and then for the second rising. It is about an hour's work but spread out over at least three hours, maybe more.
For example, my Fleischmann's yeast spent the last eight months out in the garage (long story) and when I used it yesterday it took my two whole-wheat loaves two-and-a-half hours to double in size instead of forty-five minutes. I checked the jar, and I see the yeast passed its "best before date" while in the garage: July 02, 2011. I'm writing yeast on the shopping list. So I skipped the second rising today and the bread is fine, maybe a bit dense but fine. I am sure that a bread critic could find lots to say about it, but I'm toasting and eating my own artisan loaf and I think it tastes fine.
Secondly, I babysit an elderly dog. My own dog, age 16. When I did all my retirement planning workshops in 2005 and 2009, nowhere on there did it say "looking after an elderly dog for the first three years". Not traveling. Not camping. Not spending the winters somewhere warmer than alongside an historical fur-trading route. Why is the dog still here? I ask myself every morning. And more importantly, how much longer is he going to shuffle around my house? I can't justify letting an old companion go because he is inconvenient, annoying (he has started barking at night), and costing a lot of money in meds. There has to be a more compelling reason. More later.
Thanks for reading
NorthStar