The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

It has been a strange day in Dursleyville. Not doing well at all with the New Year’s Resolution to get up every morning between 7 and 8am and to go to bed by midnight.

Been such a lazy serpent. Got up around 7am both days, pottered downstairs to the loo and then back again into the serpent sack. I could not quite understand why I have such trouble getting up when normally in January it is so light and bright around 6am that it is usually quite easy. But of course it hasn’t been so light and bright lately. Felt like such a silly twit. Two week ago there was a string of nasty 40 degree days so had pulled half the curtains to keep the light out and never bothered to pull them back again.

But I have been good with all the other items on the new habit list such as leaving a clean kitchen sink at the end of each day, planting at least one seed every single day and of course regularly watering to keep all those seeds and weeds alive.

The main item on today’s agenda was a visit to a certain old lunatic asylum which is now an arts centre. That is where I was lurking on the afternoon of Wednesday 2nd January 2002 when the green lights arrived. The magic lasted for about 2 years and then slowly faded away. Spent the next 16 years trying to work out how to get it back again.

It took the toxic antics of the dreadful Vernon Dursley to provide some insight in just how to get the green light back and how they ever went missing in the first place. The almost total lack of serpent fire in the belly turns out to have a most peculiar explanation and had an awful lot to do with Vernon Dursley's life long excessive supply of fire and fury.
But that is a tale for another day.

The ritual of writing down at the end of each day 3 good things that happened or things to be grateful for (more of course are allowed by it must be a minimum of 3) 1 thing to be mad or grumpy about, 1 thing learned and one thing achieved proved to be a useful source of inspiration.
Things to do with reading, coffee and weeds kept appearing in the first list and shops, Dursleys, crowds, kids, noise and chaos in general in the second.

So now it is time to get a bright shiny new diary for another year of serpentine observations. Turned out that there was not a single unused 2002 or 2013 diary in the stash (there are about 6 from 2016 all acquired for 50c each including A4 and A5 Moleskine journals. At that price I can just use them as everyday notebooks)

I slinked into the Art Centre’s gift shop in search of 2019 journals. I know from previous years that they often had them reduced by 50% within week or two of the new year.

There were some rather swanky diaries there with the ridiculous price of $35 but full of all sorts of interesting productivity porn tricks.

So cheapskate Izzie goes to the counter and asks when they are going to discount the 2019 diaries. The lady says that they had not yet decided but she will ring her boss. She did and replied. Right now at 30%
Ask and you shall receive!

Of course 50% would be nicer but it is after all a very special serpent birthday and the next Wednesday 2nd January will be in 2030.
The rest of the year (from Friday 1st March) will come around again in 2024 so I will wait a few weeks and hope to get a few more diaries at 50% off
So I handed over the loot and pottered off with the new Preciousss.

I did not get as much squiggling done as hoped. The place was over run with squealing rug rats and it was just too hard to concentrate. Normally the courtyard is a dead zone at this time of year.
But it was a good sign that while the noise was too loud to concentrate, I was still able to filter it out sufficiently so as not to get cranky or irritable.

So far. Nasty number but nice year.

Habits begin as cobwebs and end as cables.




On Wednesday evening I finally passed the finish line in Nanoland. For the first time I actually kept to the daily target that I had set myself of not just 1,666 words which is necessary to cross the finish line on the last day but the rather higher 2,222 words per day. This serpent is a sucker for pretty numbers.

I've aimed quite often for the safety net of an average of 2,000 per day but never seemed able to keep it up for much longer than a couple of weeks.
This time was different due to one simple new trick.

( The Early Bird catches the worm )




The video sums it up so perfectly. Establishing productive habits really is like having an army of zombie minions at your disposal.

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training." –
Archilochos

Nathan Lozeron has loads of other videos devoted to productivity porn and it's all the real thing. No click bait junk to be found. Well not yet.