Work.

I’m at the stage where all I can do is think of work, do work and dream of work.

The lovely part of this is that I skip back from the morning field, where the red mare is dreaming away her snow day, urgent to get to my desk and start typing.

The unlovely part is that everything else goes to hell. A sort of monomania takes over. Emails are not answered, laundry goes undone (it sits in plaintive piles in its basket, mocking me), hair remains bonkers, lunch is often forgotten. Since I have this absurd fantasy that I am getting better at life as I get older, this state of affairs is faintly dismaying. It’s like being back in my student days, with an essay crisis, when I used to sit up all night and write pages and pages in green ink about the Second Reform Act.

I have been thinking lately about emphasising the positive. Yes, the weather is grinding me down a little at the moment, but in the snowy fields I have the sweetest, funniest, most interesting mare in the entire world. Absolutely, we are in the February doldrums, but every morning Stanley the Dog makes me laugh as he picks up entire hay bales and hurls them about the shed in his frenzied hunt for mice. Certainly, I am toppling over into the Chasm of Domestic Disorganisation, but I have almost finished two whole books.

I read something somewhere about getting the doing of tasks to go with a swing by giving yourself small rewards. As I believe in almost nothing more than the small things, I am going to implement the tiny reward system at once. As a present for doing absolutely stupid amounts of book today, I am going to make myself some soda bread. And then I am going to eat it, hot from the oven, with absurd amounts of butter. Don’t ever say I’m not a girl who knows how to have a good time.

 

Today’s pictures:

The poor, dear old camera has finally given up the ghost. It is crusted with mud from where it has fallen to the earth, and the focus has been entirely erratic for many months, and the screen is cracked from where I accidently hurled it to the ground from the back of the red mare. (Top life tip: don’t try and ride and use a proper camera at the same time. It never ends well.) As I shop around the comparison sites and decide on my next model, I am playing around with my little iPod camera and all its different incarnations. For a sliver of a thing, it’s not bad. At least you can see the daily sweetness:

 

Poor Stan. He really, really does not like having his picture taken. Not when he could be FINDING HUGE STICKS. Just look at that plaintive face: