Relative Something

I continue to plug away at the list of tasks we have assigned ourselves toward preparing the house for sale. As each day passes, I am feeling more of a mind that we should have just shown it the way it was, and taken what people think it’s worth. Days pass, and progress is being made, but it is beginning to feel like we will never be as ready as we are trying to accomplish being.

I suppose a part of that is a result of “we” being mostly, me. When Cyndie was home for the weekend, a couple of weeks ago, we made some big progress. Since that time, things have slowed dramatically. Anyone who knows her, recognizes the dynamic of that. I do things at a lot slower a pace than she does.

I am impressing myself with a new level of effort to address things in a more immediate manner. In the past, I didn’t feel a need to fix things as soon as they were discovered. I am now making improvements on things that have lingered for so long, I accepted them as normal. Seems a bit dysfunctional, in hindsight.

You pick your battles.

It is driving me a little nuts, though, that for each improvement I complete, there are two more issues, a level down in visibility, that are suddenly revealed.

Finally fixing the long-standing, nuisance issues, reminds me of the time we decided to sell the old brown Datsun B210 that Cyndie owned when we got married. I had struggled with the parking brake for the entire time we had that car. The day that I was doing the final clean up, to put the “For Sale” sign in the window, vacuuming up the birdseed under the seats from our wedding day, years prior, I decided to lay on the ground and look into that parking brake problem.

I ended up sliding myself completely under the car, in my quest to follow the cable and figure out how it was supposed to work. From the looks of it, it couldn’t work, the way the spring was attached. It seemed totally illogical. The spring should be pulling from the other side. I detached the spring, moved it around and hooked it where I thought it should be connected. It worked perfectly.

With minimal effort, mostly just getting down there and spending a few minutes looking into it, I got that parking brake working like new on the day we sold the car. It should have been an obvious lesson for me.

Apparently, I didn’t learn well enough. I’m experiencing the same lesson again, now with my home.