My dining room table is covered with receipts and papers for me to cull and collate and arrange for my quarterly GST report - by the end of today. So I had to go somewhere else to eat. Not the living room, too cool. Behind my big chair in the bedroom is an entire bookcase full of poetry. Lovely way to start the day, with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Happiness is poetry for breakfast. So gratuitous, don't have to do anything.

Doing something is always fraught. The nicest thing about having an idea of what to write or pitch, or query about is getting the idea and not immediately doing anything about it. You've had the idea and you think it's a good one. While it's still in your mind, all things are possible. Once you've made your move and tendered some sort of application or request, it's in the recipient's court, where hope dwindles and fades and eventually dies of attrition. Back to the drawing board. Where did you file hope - under A for aspiration or D for Disappointment?

Happy thoughts tomorrow, as GMH is my witness. I may even quote a few lines.

Like most of you, I keep making lists, claiming they keep me organized and sane. But my lists are getting ahead of me these days. Rather than ticking off lists, the lists are ticking me off. Oh dear. Like every seasoned list-maker, I seed my lists, that is, I enter the odd tasks that I have already taken care of, just to make me feel better. In a slow day or week it helped to keep up my morale. Lately, however, I haven't been ticking anything off, real or factitious. I've had a lot of time as I've huddled in the cold to try to think warm, productive thoughts, not really creative but to-do things that would make me a little warmer if I tended to them. Example: carrying out the dead paper whites (don't talk to me about saving the bulbs) - down to the basement garage. I did that last week so I can't in all conscience put it on a list this week. Looking for lost things. This is usually quite comforting and warming, but I can't find anything, not even things that turn up when I'm looking for something else. Calling someone I haven't seen in a while. But I don't feel like talking. Same goes for writing notes I should be writing. I don't feel like it. That's no excuse, I know. The horrible thing is that I keep having wonderful ideas: people I should call or write (even though I haven't written the others on my lists I keep adding more) , pitches to pitch, dinner parties I should have, or even a small group (two?) for drinks. No, no, no.

Is this a mid-winter blog or what?