Elusive notebooks

This woman who keeps a blog I enjoy visiting mentioned something today that made me realise just how important it is to write down ideas immediately before they are lost forever. Her words, and mine too now. But the thing about notebooks beside the bed has worked only sporatically for me. I have many techniques to keep my ideas active, but for some reason, I can't seem to actually get it together. I figure it is because:

• the notebook is too big and gets moved by me or the toddler
  
• the notebook is too small and falls down between the stack of books
  
• there are too many notebooks to keep track of
  
• I lost the pen
  

So I decided to use the little tape recorder that I sometimes took with me to my Technical Writing class at York U. But as soon as I press record I seem to lose my voice. It's like I'm shy or something, to use a device to record my voice. The voice sounds foreign and that makes my ideas sound like they're someone elses. I'm better at writing than speaking.

But one thing is for certain. My most precious, fantastic, inspiring ideas, not to mention exact sentence structures, come to me when I'm:

• in bed trying to sleep and I can't find the notebook, pen etc (see above)
  
• in the shower (must get some crayon soap at Toys R Us)
  
• elbow-deep in diapers, laundry, dishes (you know...toddler in house)
  
• picking up dog-poop
  

Tried using the Palm Pilot but it's too time consuming to tap my way through ideas.

So my first objective is to merge all my notes from all my notebooks, tape recorder, and electronic files into one electronic file, and go from there.

But this will have to wait till after I change the baby, pick up the dog poop, throw in some laundry and have a shower.