Elusive words

Lately I've been having trouble writing. The ideas are there, but I can't seem to catch them, so I'm left feeling frustrated--and cranky! I know this happens to all writers at some point. It's happened to me before, and it will happen again.

I wrote the following 100-words exercise on April 4 when I was feeling the same way:

Sleet rings against the window, and the steadiness of it--ping, ping, ping--has a trancelike quality to it, and I can almost forget that it's there as I sit and write these words, these words that for the past several days have been so hard to pull from my mind, for whatever reason, and I've realized how hard it is to be a writer whose ideas are drifting away from her, rolling like a tumbleweed down the road, and even though I chase after them, run as fast as I can to catch them, somehow they still elude me.