Quiet time

Scheduling a regular quiet time is a headache.  Sticking to the schedule is hard.  How do you dig out a half hour of time when there's laundry to do, cats to feed, litter boxes to muck out, a house to keep clean, and a life to keep organised?  Lunchtime works OK, so long as I can get away on my own.  It will be harder to hide out in the car at lunchtime as it gets colder.

Then there's the question of what do you do in a quiet time.  Thanks to the women's retreat back in September, I have a much better idea.  The plan was to read something (non Bible), write something, read the Bible, pray something, listen, and write again.  I'm working through Thomas Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation" and it does pretty well.  I have my eye on Henri Nouwen's "The Genesee Diary" for when I'm done with this book, and after that, "The Intimate Merton"

How do you handle quiet times? What do you do to guard the time?  What do you do when you have one?  I can't be the only one who has a problem with this.