I missed writing my posts yesterday. There were many reasons:

The new iPad Air and iPhone 5S arrived. Now, I'm a great believer in delayed gratification, but there are just some things I want to do right now. So I opened them and had a play around. Takes time.
Photo: USA Today 

A couple hours later the new Wemo motion sensor arrived by courier. Another happy hour went by as I tried it out.

My wife made a fruit cake. It was a little brown on top. I spent some time with her debating if the oven was running too hot. Then we had to taste it, and sit down and talk about it. A few more minutes gone.
 

I watched "Airplane Repo"on tv. This fascinating program shows a bunch of pilots taking airplanes off nonpaying deadbeat owners. As a pilot myself I find that program interesting, but even fast-forwarding through the ads in the recorded video, I still spent an hour watching it. Yeah, I know.
Photo: Airplane Repo

My websites went down. For 8 hours nobody could access quite a few of my websites, including my main Silver Lotto System site. All the Plan B options I had in place were useless... I was prevented using them by the type of problem the host had with the server. Much of this time was spent trying to get the problem fixed from halfway across the world. It's fixed now.
 

So yesterday was a disaster. It reminded me of how easily routine can get messed up when things are out of your control. (OK, maybe except the fruit cake test!)

A while back my rubbish was late getting emptied a couple of times. I happened to talk to the contractor when it was delayed a few weeks back.

We had talked before... I knew that that he had a son working in a bank in the Pacific Islands, that he had been doing his job for 12 years, and a few more interesting things I hadn't expected about him.

But on these two occasions he had a puncture on his garbage truck tire, and the repair had messed up his routine. I joked that I hoped he didn't miss buying his lottery tickets, and he said unfortunately he did miss getting them.

This wasn't the reason my garbage truck was late! Photo: Telegraph

There's an important tip right there: Whatever you do, don't be so involved in life that you forget your task - buying those tickets at the store.

Make a special time early on in the week for getting those tickets, and make sure you follow through and do it.

It's amazing how little it takes to mess up your routine!