Lack of stimulation

God I'm bored...
I've been at work the last three days and I've had very little to do. I was only in to cover really and people haven't needed me much. I had a little project to do which I started just before leaving yesterday and I was looking forward to carrying on with it today and actually enjoying the challenges it would inevitably bring. Unfortunately, it went almost completely according to plan and everything worked first time.
Normally this would probably be a good thing as I'm usually pretty busy but I wanted it to go a little wrong so I would have to sit and think about it and maybe puzzle things through, but it wasn't to be.
So now I'm sat at work with little to do. Of course there are lots of things I could do if I wished to, but I'm tired, I'm not happy at being at work between Christmas and New year in the first place and my motivation, (which seems to peak at around 60% of an average person's on one of their bad days,) has slunk off outside to have a fag and is sulking.
There are lots of topics to blog about, but again, I'm tired, my motivation has now decided we're not on speaking terms and I've lost the will to finish this se...
Every now and then I'll get the little envelope sign that means I've got a new email. This elicits a small wake up call in my brain and I get, for a short period, slightly more alert and just the tiniest bit excited. A new email! If I'm really lucky it will be from a friend and I'll relieve my boredom for a handful of minutes by reading it and then concocting a reply that probably far outweighs the necessary response. This is how my friends can tell if I'm busy or not, stressed or bored etc - by the length and verbosity of my emails. If I'm busy, it's short, sharp and to the point with no wasted words. Strunk and White would be proud of the brevity. If I'm bored, then I digress, I wax lyrical and generally write my prose in a flowery and rambling style. If I'm really busy, then they get no reply at all and if I'm really bored, then they get a draft of a manuscript for a story I'm working on and a request to proof read it and mark any salient points that require attention. Anyway all day so far it's been system administrator messages or bouncebacks from spam that I just have to delete. *Sigh*
I do like to write. I pretty much always have. At age 5 on my first day of junior school we got given little excercise books, and I diligently wrote my name on the front without being asked because it said 'Name' with a little space next to it. My teacher came over and said I shouldn't have done it because he was going to write our names on our books for us, at which point I stared him straight in the eye and told him in no uncertain terms that I was quite capable of doing it myself, thank you very much.
I started this blog partly because it gives me a chance to write in my own voice, in my own style and without getting bogged down in things like character and plot. I have so many ideas for things and so many projects I've started, it's untrue. I have an idea for a short animation I'd like to do, (which has stalled during the creation of the main character like so many before it,) I have two short stories which I have jotted down a few ideas for, I've had ideas for at least three cartoon strips, one short-span comic and I have one main book that I have actually started writing, including a fair amount of background research and back story creation. Oh and I've also jotted down some ideas for material for stand up comedy, (which I'd still like to have a crack at cometime, just to attend an open mike night. Even if I bomb I'll only be doing it for the experience of doing it, so what the hell.) as well as ideas for a sitcom I'd like to write, with some crossover from the stand up stuff.
There are a number of obstacles to my finishing these projects: My previously mentioned motivation, (I would state a lack of time, but I find plenty of time to spend doing other things like watching comedy dvds, going out to pubs and spending time with my other half.) my short attention span, (it's not like ADHD short, I just have lots of new ideas all the time and a new idea seems more shiny than a project I've worked on for a while,) and time is a little bit of a factor - I do work full time after all.
I often think if I won the lottery, I might spend a lot of time doing this stuff - finishing these projects so I can put them to bed. This would be after I'd done a hell of a lot of travelling of course. I also think about taking some time off work and just going for it - beavering away at some of them until they're done, but I pretty much know I'd end up just watching dvds and so on like usual and then I'd resent having taking the time off and not doing anything with it.
I bought myself a laptop, justifying it to myself by saying I would be able to take it to cafes and pubs etc where they had WiFi points, (or even without internet access,) and do some writing. I used to take a paper into a local cafe bar at the weekend and sit and have a coffee or beer, read my paper and it would completely relax me for the duration of the weekend. There was just something about reading alone in a room full of other people that I liked, so I figured if I had a laptop, I could bring that and write and that might be even more wonderful still (I still think it sounds like it might well be,). Thing is, I've bought the laptop and two things have happened.
One is that my original plan of getting rid of my desktop machine has faltered. I thought once I have the laptop I won't need the desktop any more, so I'll sell it. Thing is, I've found I've become rather attached to it. I did build it myself from parts I selected and then put together, but that's not it. I think part of it is the fact that it has 200GB of space over two hard drives, whereas my laptop has only 80GB and I have at least 15GB of just music. I'm still thinking of selling it and getting an external HDD for all my data.
The second is that I've stopped going to the cafe bar at weekends. I do like my laptop a great deal - I love WiFi in a way I never thought I would and adore being able to sit in the lounge and surf the web when the router is upstairs, (One of my housemates keeps her laptop in the lounge and is very rarely off it, even if we put a dvd on,) but I haven't taken it with me anywhere, apart from to my friend's house when I visited them over Christmas (I took it in case I wanted to do some writing, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to for the three days I was there as I would be spending time with them,). I even got a decent carry case for it so I had no excuse, (it fitted in my old rucksack perfectly well, but I wanted a carry case because it just looks cool. Well, it does if you're a bit of a geek like me. OK, a big geek...) but no, nada, nothing.
I guess I'll just have to break it out and actually DO something on it. *Sigh*