Imbalance, Rebalance

Something's not quite right in my life; I'm out of balance. Fortunately — and I know this is rare — I know what's wrong and I have a pretty good idea how to fix it.

A few months ago I got this laptop. It's a Toshiba Satellite with a Celeron (celery!) processor and 192 MB of RAM. It's running Windows XP and it's really, really slow. (I should probably switch to Ubuntu.) Nevertheless, it's a laptop, and that means I can fart around on the Internet while we watch TV, after the girls are in bed. That's good because it adds an extra couple of hours to my Internet day, giving me time to blog and Twitter. It's bad because somehow the combination of TV and Internet makes it very, very hard for me to get off my butt and go to bed at a reasonable hour, leaving me cranky and exhausted the next day. The other bad is that I don't write particularly well when I'm watching TV, and I don't watch TV particularly well when I'm writing. The TV I watch tends to reward attentive viewing, and half-watching it is worse than either watching it or not watching it at all.

Simple problem, simple fix: I'm going to stop using the laptop in the evenings, and instead watch TV properly, or read if it's one of Blake's shows. I'll go to bed at a decent hour, which will give me the energy to write in the afternoons. Currently my afternoons are spent either napping (on the really bad days) or reading, with a little light housekeeping if I absolutely have to. I'm not sure whether writing in the afternoon will deal too much of a blow to my reading time; I hope I will be able to get to bed by ten and read until eleven, and maybe read in the mornings sometimes too.

All this is temporary, of course: once Cordelia is in school everything will change again and I'll have to find a new balance.