It's a particularly good question on cold and frosty mornings when it's dark when you wake up and bed is the only really warm place. It would be so easy to pull the duvet over your head and go back to sleep.
But no there are blogs to write, diaries to write, publications to write and those leaves in the garden won't clear up by themselves.
The motivation comes from somewhere inside and I do feel that setting myself goals helps. If I have something to aim at it seems to keep me going.
I still have around 67 miles to walk to complete my 1,500 for the year. That is now just two and a half miles a day for the rest of December. When I started on January 1st, I needed to walk over four miles a day, every day to achieve my goal. Now it's down to significantly less and I feel the end is in sight and by my calculations I am due to complete the 1500 miles around the 22nd of the month. I will keep going until the 31st just to see how many more miles I can complete.
At the same time, I committed to write 365 blogs - one for every day of the year. There have been a few days when I have done multiple blogs and so I am well on target with this part of my challenge. You will be glad to know that I'm not setting any challenges or targets for 2013. It will be nice not to have to go out for long walks when it's cold and miserable. But, as I've said before, I will continue to blog. I told you how a couple of ladies thanked me over the weekend and today another said that reading my blog is the first thing she does every morning. So hello to Juliet.
My aims for the first three months of next year are to get two books published. The first is my account of the Le Paradis Massacre where I'm still waiting to hear from various publishers after being let down by one. Then there's the book you have all been waiting for. It will be particularly effective in the middle of the night if you can't sleep as you can just read a few pages and you will be in the land of Nod before you know it. This will be my autobiography. You can't imagine how much I have enjoyed writing it. The memories of faces and places and events have just flooded back. I've already written 63,000 words and by the time I finish it is likely to have reached 100,000 as there are some subjects I haven't even touched on.
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Yesterday I had a nice morning helping out at the Forget Me Not Club which is run by the Hethersett Dementia Support Group. Got down there at 9 am after throwing off the sloth of demotivation (see above). First job was to help our district and county councillor David Bills to set the Christmas tree up and then decorate it. Then there were tables and chairs to put out and my job was then to do the mulled wine.
Now I'm going to let you into a little secret. I am famed for my mulled wine but it's all a sham. I have to take you back a quarter of a century to events held by what was then Hethersett VC Middle School. One Christmas time I was asked if I would do the mulled wine for a social event. It was later voted the best mulled wine people had ever tasted. Likewise, my mulled wine yesterday was praised to the hilt. I'm just glad nobody asked me for the recipe as I like to keep a modicum of secrecy in these things.
So this is where I come clean. All those years ago I took numerous bottles of cheap red wine, chucked in a load of sugar, some honey, a load of fruit, some lemonade, some orange juice and some cloves etc and just heated the whole thing up and gave it a good stir. In other words, I had just used things that were at hand in a higgledy piggledy manner.
Did pretty much the same thing yesterday. I chucked four bottles of non-alcoholic (this was in a Methodist Church Hall after all) mulled wine in a saucepan, added lemon and orange juice and some lemon and orange peel and added the secret ingredient - love. I stirred to perfection and then ladled it into mugs and that was that.
There was a goodly crowd and carol singing and other Christmassy type songs. Then there were mince pies, sausage rolls and cake and then we cleared up and caught the bus into Norwich.
I love shopping in Norwich - well I love it for about nine minutes and then I start to get bored. We did manage to get a few Christmas presents after lunch at our favourite Italian restaurant/cafe Saporita. The Bruschetta is wonderful and just full of garlic and so somebody is bound to suffer from that.
By 3 pm, we had had enough and so queued up for the bus home. It wasn't an orderly queue at all and this bloke came from the other direction as the bus pulled in and just went to the head of the queue and got on the bus first. This man was at the elderly end of the spectrum. The kind of person who probably moans about the youth of today not having any respect for their elders. We find it is often the older people who are the rude ones and the younger who stand back and invite you to get on the bus ahead of them, I wrote about queues in a recent blog so I won't comment any further on this latest piece of rudeness.
The bus ride home was really quite weird. We had people with cases jostling with people with pushchairs, people complaining to the driver about the behaviour of other passengers, a rather large man asleep and taking up two seats when there were people standing. It was all very slow going and strange but not in a good way. I have to say I usually enjoy getting the bus into and out of the city but not yesterday and I was glad to get off in the village.
Well I think I've waffled enough for one day. I must go back to writing my autobiography. I've got to the bit where myself and eight ladies have been asked to write an essay on catching a penis in a trouser zip (yes you did read that correctly). You'll have to wait for the book to come out to find out where and how this came about.
More rubbish tomorrow.