Posts Tagged ‘accomplishments’
Rewarding Accomplishments
On a weekend when we squeezed in two evening trips to the Cities for wonderful social occasions and a surprise visit from sister, Judy, and husband, Scott, Cyndie and I also knocked off mowing and trimming the entire labyrinth of some tall growth. Our growing ground cover has made efficient use of the rain we received last week. The lawn grass is so long already, I need to mow again less than a week after I just finished the whole property.
I took a panoramic photo into the sun to show the freshly coifed labyrinth with the adjacent gazebo and its barely alive vines for a roof cover.
We also made short work yesterday of an inspiration I had to open up a new footpath through an untraveled section of our woods. Untraveled by us, that is. We chose to route it primarily along an obvious path traversed by deer often enough that our eyes were able to discern where they have been walking.
Of course, being deer, they seem to magically navigate through downed or low-hanging branches that entangle us. A bit of pruning and sawing provided quick reward and suddenly we had a whole new shortcut between two existing trails.
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We were so pleased with it, we sauntered back and forth along the new route multiple times, just to enjoy the experience.
It was very rewarding to get two projects off the to-do list, even though one of them had just been spontaneously added the day before. Accomplished, nonetheless.
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Winning Cups
I watched the NHL Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup by defeating the Montreal Canadians on Wednesday night. The television broadcast included some post-game celebrations and interviews with winning players. It included the typical reaction of, “I don’t have words to describe the feeling.”
The mostly bearded and predominantly burly men were hugging with passion and obviously over the moon with joy.
They won the Stanley Cup.
“We worked so hard for this.”
Yeah, I’m sure they did. Surviving a season of games and all the playoffs in the NHL is quite a feat. It’s in the realm of racing a bicycle for 21 days in France or climbing in the death zone to reach the top of Everest.
Heroic efforts like those bring the ultimate rewards that participants struggle to describe.
On Thursday morning, while I was grunting and sweating through my daily exercises for core strength, the thought occurred to me that I work really hard on this but I don’t get a cup.
The rest of us work really hard at our jobs every day. We labor through getting errands done, bills paid, mouths fed. We sweat and ache, we race, we problem solve, we fix broken things, and do the laundry. Sometimes it feels like there is not enough air to breathe.
But we don’t suddenly win and then take a few months off. No trophies, no podiums, no mountain tops. Day after day we get up and fight our battles without an end in sight.
Maybe that is why I like to watch sports. I live vicariously through the athletic accomplishments of others. This line of thinking has given me a new understanding of the people who buy lottery tickets. It becomes their shot at winning the cup. Otherwise, it’s just the daily grind with no end in sight.
I work hard. I’d kinda like to have a Stanley Cup moment like those guys.
Wouldn’t we all?
Now get back to work. It’s another day of doing what all the rest of us do every day.
We can watch trophy celebrations on tv later.
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Accomplishment Burst
After a few days of not doing anything productive, it didn’t take much yesterday to make me feel like I’d salvaged the weekend by accomplishing something beyond just feeling better. It helped that the weather was especially nice, despite starting out rather brisk in the early morning.
By the time I made it out of the house, the chill had been replaced by an increasingly comfortable November breeze. My first goal was to get the truck battery charging. For some reason we have yet to discern, every other time Cyndie uses it, there’s not enough battery to turn it over when we next try.
Logic would indicate she is leaving something on, or maybe not closing a door tight. I don’t know. We have yet to find any clear evidence of what it is, and the fact that it doesn’t happen every time complicates the mystery.
While the truck charged, I headed down to the round pen to help Cyndie rake out and distribute the sand that was added. We got the project down to a manageable-sized remaining pile after spreading an even new depth throughout the whole circle.
On my way in for lunch, I paused at the garage to get the truck started and let it idle while winding up cords and putting away the charger. Then I checked and re-checked to make sure nothing was left on to put any drain on the battery. It better start when we test it again. Cyndie wasn’t anywhere near it when I did all this. 🙂
After lunch, I enlisted Cyndie’s help to tackle a chore I have neglected for over a year. This one means the most to me to have finally resolved.
Almost 2-years ago I had a little accident when trying to get the diesel tractor out of the shop garage to plow snow at a time when a storm had knocked out our power. The garage door did not stay up all the way and the roof of the tractor caught the weather-strip of the door and ripped it down. I saved the moderately bent up aluminum and rubber strip, but had no idea how it could go back on.
I neglected it for the entirety of last winter, studiously shoveling out all the snow that repeatedly blew under the door, instead of looking closer at the weather strip. Honestly, I had pretty much given up caring about the conspicuously absent finishing strip on the bottom of the huge door.
When I was building the last hay box in the barn stalls, I needed a board from my stash up in the rafters of the garage, and that meant I had to move the old weather strip out of the way. I decided to just take it down and lay it in front of the door, to make it easier to reattach than struggle to put back up on the rafters again.
The strategy worked! It took a little creative problem solving, but Cyndie and I figured out how to get the rubber to slide off the aluminum, so we could access the screws. With a few minor steps to add some screws in new locations, we got it reattached and were able to get the rubber back in place. We successfully recycled a part that would have otherwise been tossed.
No snow inside the garage this year!
With that success bolstering my confidence, I hopped on the lawn tractor and mowed the front yard. It struck me that I had been working in a short-sleeved T-shirt all day, and was mowing my lawn like a summer day, on the 8th of November. I’ve dealt with worse working conditions.
After that, I got the horses fed and cleaned up manure, before calling it a day and heading inside.
I think actions speak louder than words to reveal evidence that I am, indeed, feeling much better after several days of rest and Cyndie’s exceptional care.
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Comes Around
Last year, when I was home full-time, I often looked forward to the moment when Cyndie would arrive home from work and cruise up the driveway where she could see the results of my day’s effort on some project or another. Of course, this only worked if she made it home before dark, which is a tough thing to do during the period when the sun sets before 5:00 in the afternoon.
Sadly, more often than not, I would need to prompt for some feedback, and the response tended to reveal that she hadn’t noticed a thing. After the long commute, just reaching the driveway safely becomes the primary milestone of note, which tends to swamp the senses and blur specific details that may have been noteworthy.
Yesterday, after I pulled up the driveway, I did see the horses grazing in the hay-field nearby, but after that, pretty much a blur. I found Delilah waiting on the other side of the door, as I walked into the house, but no Cyndie. After a wonderfully happy greeting from our dog, I watched her move to the doors beside the fireplace which provide a view beyond our deck to the back yard hill that slopes down to the labyrinth garden.
With no leaves on the trees, it was easy to spot Cyndie pushing the reel mower on the path of the labyrinth. Delilah anxiously followed her master’s every move in the distance. That dog really bonds with the person who is home with her all day.
When Cyndie eventually made her way back up to the house, she promptly asked me how the place looked when I pulled in.
Busted.
I hadn’t noticed all the work she had labored to accomplish on her own while I was away. I felt awful to have missed it, and I gained a new appreciation for what it was like for her last year, before our roles became reversed.
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Great Surprise
Yesterday, it being Saturday – in which neither Cyndie nor I needed to depart for our day-jobs – we set a larger than possible list of goals for chores we wanted to accomplish. We decided to start in the barn, because the 
crew had arrived there to work on putting rafters on the planned hay shed. We cleaned two of the four stables, and leveled the dirt floor in them so we could place thick stall mats that Cyndie recently purchased. She also brought home lumber for raising the walls, but we postponed that for another time, to allow us to get on to other goals we had in mind. (The previous owners had mini-horses, so their stalls and fences were all undersized for our plans.)
After a brief lunch snack, we moved on to the second project from our list, deep in the woods, clearing our trails of the downfall still remaining from the May 2nd snow storm that snapped limbs on so many trees here. We had the chainsaw, a pole saw, our new Stihl trimmer with a saw blade on the end, (like the one of Ian’s I used when we were in Portugal), a pry bar, rope, shovel and rake, along with a can of gas packed in the trailer behind the lawn tractor.
I had just cut a very large branch that was broken 12 feet farther up, and the bent-over portion was caught in the branches of several other trees. We tossed the rope over it and Cyndie and I were well into the tangle of growth nearby, tugging to pull the branch over and off the others. Suddenly we heard voices calling and wondered who it could possibly be.
I hollered an acknowledgement and hiked out of the woods and up the hill to find that our good friends, Rogie & Kris, had made a surprise visit! What a treat. I coerced them to hike back down with me to surprise Cyndie, and see the complexity of our clearing project underway.
We had a wonderful visit, walking them around to show off all the progress we have made since they last saw the place. We paused for refreshments and later, captured the moment with a picture, using the self-timer on Cyndie’s camera.
What a great treat it is to have friends stop by to see us. With the good energy of their visit, we headed down to finish what we could of the lumberjack work on the trail. The task becomes all-consuming and, as we often do, we lose sight of how long we have worked. In a blink, the sun is getting low, and we have worked right through the dinner hour.
Cyndie spent a loooong time afterward, brushing burrs out of Delilah, before we let her back in the house.
Without a doubt, these days are a lot more work than the comparative hours spent at our day-jobs. It was a real blessing to have the surprise break in the middle, and to reconnect with friends.
Thanks, Roeglins!
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