I'm reasonably organised about keeping a calendar these days; I generally have a good idea of what I'll be doing for most of a week before I go shopping to buy food for that week. However, somewhere between the calendar and the shopping list I always seem to have a failure of organisation.

If I've arranged to cook a particular meal for a guest, I'll generally remember to buy the ingredients for that; but that's about as far as my efficiency goes, because at the same time I'll tend to forget that this also means my normal weekly cookery needs to contain one portion fewer, so I'll overcater for the rest of the week. And conversely, although I've known for some weeks that yesterday was not going to be the normal Doctor-Who-and-Chinese-takeaway gathering at the Gallery, I totally failed to anticipate in advance that this meant I had to arrange something else to eat.

I suppose that ideally, when I make my shopping list, I should look at the calendar for the coming week, and go through it day by day actually concentrating on each meal. But I can't imagine that working: I have the horrible feeling that after I'd tried it for a couple of weeks, I'd get really bored, start taking mental shortcuts, and thereby allow all the same errors to creep back in.

I've felt very very tired for the last few days. This isn't very surprising. For the last month or two I've been terribly efficient. I've done enormous amounts of useful work on PuTTY; I've managed all sorts of feats of organisation of which I'm usually incapable; and I've been generally unable to sit down for a rest without immediately thinking ‘ooh, I know what I meant to get round to doing’ and jumping up again. It was inevitable that I'd run out of energy to maintain this pace sooner or later.

Accordingly I did very little indeed on Saturday; and nonetheless on Sunday I was so tired as to be unusually grumpy. It felt as if I was being grumpy about the appalling state of my love life (having spent way too much of my life feeling pretty bad about having hopelessly fallen for people who weren't interested in me, it comes to something when I feel as if that would be an improvement on the current state of apathetic listlessness!), but in fact I suspect I was just short on sleep and hence in a mood to turn background annoyances into foreground annoyances without particular provocation.

Fortunately, beckyc unexpectedly rang my doorbell in the afternoon and invited me to a mulled wine and mince pie gathering downstairs, and then I went round to the Gallery for their version of this year's Christmas, and those managed to lift my mood for most of the rest of the day.

Now I'm back at work until midday on Wednesday, and then I'm off until the New Year. Somehow it feels like holiday already, despite me having dragged myself out of bed on a Monday morning to come to the office as usual.