How do firemen do it?

No - i'm not being saucy. I'm talking about waking up to an alarm bell, getting dressed, and going to work. All in the space of a few minutes.

Miraculously, I actually have some work at the moment, a freelance project for a few weeks. You'd think I'd be grateful for this, but what do I do? I keep distracting myself, that's what. Hell, I'm writing this instead of working, aren't I?

It's 12 noon, and I've only done about half an hour of work. I don't even have to slide down a pole to get to work - I just have to walk from one side of my bedroom to the other. This is why I set my alarm clock for 8:59 a.m. - in theory it should only take a minute to walk from my bed to my desk. In fact, i don't even need a minute to do it, more like about 3 seconds, but my alarm doesn't have the facility to allow me to wake up at 8:59:57.

So, what do I do after the alarm goes off? Well, this morning I spent about half an hour just lying there feeling sorry for myself for being hung over (and on a paltry 4 drinks) and then I watched quite an interesting programme about marmite. HOT NEWS: they're making it in a squeezy bottle. There was some debate in this programme about whether it was spelt 'Squeezy' or 'Squeazy', which quite frankly is obviously the former, but their dyslexic graphic designer had used the latter spelling on all his designs, so had to go back to the graphics tablet.

See, graphic design isn't just about using Photoshop to trace over a photo you've found on Google Image Search, it's also about being able to spell (and a few other such technical things you wouldn't understand). In fact, because of the huge potential for disaster in getting a spelling wrong in a design, I often spend hours worrying about doing exactly the kind of thing the Marmite man did. Ironically, I've just had to look up 'dyslexic' in a dictionary only to discover that it's not spelt 'dislexic'.

Anyway, yes, this gist was that the little nozzle on the end of the squeezy (or squeazy for all you designers out there) bottle didn't work very well so they got behind schedule until they decided to use a valve thingy instead.

It really was an interesting programme.

After that, I finally got out of bed at about 10.30 and went to the kitchen to see what was available for breakfast. Despite having a choice of breakfasts that would put Seinfeld to shame (that man always seems to have at least 20 different boxes of cereal in his kitchen), I always feel like having the one thing that's not in my cupboard. This morning it was beans on toast (no, i don't keep toast in my cupboard, i just didn't have any baked beans), so I went and bought a couple of tins. But tomorrow, i can guarantee that i won't want beans on toast, or anything else that's alreay in my cupboard.

Finally I started working at about 11 a.m., which is actually my record earliest time since starting the project. If i take baby steps, I may be able to get that down to 9 a.m. by the last day of the project.

Hmm...is it lunchtime yet?