Posts Tagged ‘frustration’
Rough Start
The day dawned full of promise yesterday, and I had a long list of things I wanted to accomplish. The biggest thing I ended up accomplishing was overcoming a series of frustrations in the morning that threatened to derail my whole day. It was one of those times when an attempt to knock off a few easy tasks backfires because one thing after another goes badly until it seems like each failure is feeding off the one before it.
The head of a screw breaking off is annoying but the steel tines of a bedding fork snapping at the handle was uncalled for.
I switched to something with less risk of failure. Beyond shredding the flesh of my forearms on tangles of bramble, the hauling away of the piles of vines we have been extracting the last few weeks was the beginning of a trend of success for me. In addition to the vines, while we were in that mode of hauling, we accomplished a couple more loads of piles of branches that litter our woods.
Eventually, it became time to crank up the riding mower to conquer some of the lawn grass that has been doubling in height by the day lately. We won’t be participating in any no-mow-May campaigns this year. My mowing started in April.
Cyndie thought the mowing tracks in the grass were worth a picture.
I was pleased with my ability to minimize muddy skidding in wet areas on my first time operating the zero-turn in many months.
Today, I hope to tackle the labyrinth with the push mower in preparation for World Labyrinth Day on Saturday. It will depend on the 50% chance of rain being forecast. Timing is everything. If I had mowed too many days before the event, the grass is growing so fast this time of year that it would be longer than we want.
The grass in the pastures is already getting beyond the rate of the horses’ grazing, and they are spending most of their time out there. Granted, I spotted a fair amount of napping going on on the high slope of the hay field, so not all their time out there is being spent gobbling grass blades.
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Accepting Frustration
The feeling of frustration happens when I can’t control situations in the direction I wish for them to go. I am not a dog trainer and rarely succeed in influencing our dog, Asher, to behave in a way that will be convenient for me and safe for him. I found myself in that miserable place yesterday because of a flock of wild turkeys and a growing weariness from two weeks of being the sole person feeding horses and walking the dog.
We currently have a lot of activity around us tempting the poor dog to stray beyond our property lines. Corn fields on two sides of our property are being harvested and Asher finds the big machines and guys frequently walking between tractors and trucks very fascinating. Soon there will be deer hunters out in numbers.
For that reason, I can’t let him roam loose on walks around the property. Unfortunately, being leashed doesn’t always stop him from getting away from me. The urgency with which he bolts into tight squeezes between trees at the sight of a squirrel jars me off my feet and forces me to let go of the leash to save myself.
Not letting go of the leash is how Cyndie ended up breaking her ankle with Delilah a year ago.
After a very long time of allowing Asher to follow his nose and explore the far reaches of our property at will yesterday (sniffari), we stopped in the barn to tend to the horses. While they were gobbling feed, I decided to walk Asher up to the house. Without warning, he pulled me off balance around the corner of the garage. He flew over the large rocks by the front door and disappeared around the outside of the sunroom. I let go as my feet hit the biggest rock, sailing over it and landing in the yard on my stomach like a humiliated Superman fallen from flight.
That’s when I noticed a lot of big birds taking flight for treetops in the neighboring woods. I could hear the leaves crunching under Ashers’ bounding leaps but I couldn’t see him. By the time I made it back on my feet, it was all quiet and Asher and the turkeys were nowhere in sight.
I wanted to just wait for him to return but he was dragging a leash and the odds were high that he was going to get hung up in a tangled mess. I heard one distant bark that sounded like it could be his, so I set off on a search and rescue mission.
With occasional calls and whistles, I climbed toward a high ridge seeking the widest view and ultimately a farm road around the next field over. Soon after making my way out of the woods, I spotted Asher just as I feared, with the leash caught on a branch, passing through a rusty barbed wire fence, and wrapped twice around a small tree trunk.
Struggling to get him to walk straight home with me, I was in no mood to fight off my simmering frustration.
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Yard Birds
********** (Yesterday, an otherwise wonderful Sunday morning, I failed in my battle with learning the new “block” system of editing a WordPress post. I lost my temper, threw my computer, and went outside without publishing a post, where I would be able to work on projects I could control.
Try as I might to format the text and images to achieve my intention, the results consistently foiled me. After repeated unintended results which looked ridiculously wrong, from which I could not find the “undo” option that would at least return to the previous look, I boiled over.
Without going back and striving to accomplish my goal, I am, for now, resigning myself to living with whatever result this new editor mode produces, whether I like it, or not.
The following is the text and images I wanted to post yesterday morning, not as I intended it to look, but as the WordPress software allows me to present.)
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The pullets and Rocky are still confined to a fenced courtyard attached to the coop, but the big girls –a buff orpington, an australorpe, and a wyandotte– wander the property freely.
Saturday, while Cyndie was cleaning up the pine needle aftermath left from our removal of another dead pine tree, the three hens showed up to get in on the action.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to offer food to her loved ones, Cyndie had a treat ready to serve.
The girls rarely pass up the offerings of anything edible.
I think it shows in their not-so-svelte silhouettes.
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Heavy Handed
I haven’t quite mastered the art of using the loader on our tractor yet, but I’m gaining confidence. What that means is, I am able to make more mistakes quicker.
More than once yesterday I was heavy-handed on the lever and scooped too deep beneath the pile of lime screenings. We worked to spread most of the pile before the weather makes a season-long shift to frozen ground.
It’s the kind of thing that drives this perfectionist to major frustration.
One way I get over it is to move on to the next time-sensitive task that needs to happen. Cyndie and I removed the canvas from the gazebo before the first accumulating snow falls.
From up close, I discovered the gory details related to the subtle lean the structure has taken on that has been visible for a few months.
My first inclination was that the soft wet ground had given in on one side, but now I don’t think that was the case.
It’s possible the horses pushed against one side. It’s also possible that an extreme wind gust applied enough torque to bend the frame. Thinking about it, the second scenario would seem to make more sense, because if it was the horses, I believe they would have pushed it even further. Or they would have pushed it again after the fact and compounded the damage.
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With daylight fading, I left the bent frame to be dealt with next spring and switched my attention to moving the deck furniture to our winter storage location on the back side of the house. It was the last thing I wanted to accomplish for the day.
Just as soon as I shed my outdoor gear to settle inside for the evening, Cyndie realized she needed her winter tires for a car appointment today. We store them on a shelf in the shop garage that gets accessed two times a year, so plenty of stuff ends up getting piled in the way.
Back outside I went. On the bright side, I was going to need to get the tires down anyway. I need to swap to winter wheels on the Grizzly and they are stored on that same shelf. Best of all, no additional problems turned up with my last two tasks so, no new added frustrations.
It feels good to have enough done that the impending snowfall brings with it no extra dread. The essentials have now all been handled.
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Tractor Timber
Despite the inherent risks in dealing with trees that have blown over, but remain hung up in the branches of other trees beside them, I chose to see if I could push them over using the loader on our tractor.
Whether or not it made any sense to try, I forged ahead on the idea that it just might work.
First, I needed to attach the loader bucket that I’ve recently taken to storing at one end of the hay shed.
The following is pretty much how the previous week unfolded for me, in terms of frustrations.
As I approached the hay shed on the tractor, I realized the trailer on the back of the truck was parked directly in front of the spot I needed to reach. Keys to the truck were up at the house.
I caught sight of Cyndie just crossing the yard and shouted to ask if she could grab the keys.
She turned the key and the starter stuttered the staccato clatter of “not enough battery.”
“Not again! Not now!”
For some unidentified reason, this happens at very unpredictable odd intervals. The truck needed to have its battery charged again. It was parked far enough away that it would require an extension cord, and then I realized the nearest outlet was dead because I had borrowed the circuit breaker last fall to use for the waterer over the winter.
I swapped out the breaker, got the battery charging, and decided to do some lawn mowing. All that served to do was intensify my frustration over the odd problem of the middle blade not cutting and the outside blades cutting low. Something more than just a broken bracket must have gone wrong when it failed last week.
I did the bare minimum of ugly mowing and then put it away to start the truck.
All that frustration before I could get to the task I intended.
Compared to those hassles, the rest of my project went swimmingly. I pulled up to the trees, lifted the bucket to test the weight, and after an initial slip, successfully pushed the trees over with a resounding crash.
Yikes. It was both scary and satisfying.
Most of all, it wasn’t frustrating.
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Sand Box
After work yesterday, I went outside to play in our sand box. It wasn’t pretty. There were a few expletives expressed in the execution of the task.
We had an extra load of lime screenings dumped beside the hay shed for use in filling low spots and rills in the paddock. The horses kick constantly in response to flies on their legs and their doing so digs out the area around their hay boxes. The rills on the slope are created by water runoff from heavy rains.
Both issues require trying to get the tractor up the incline to the barn, with a heavy bucket load of lime screenings. I have yet to acquire the skills and knowledge to efficiently navigate the 12 forward gears of the New Holland to get it to go where I want to go and do what I intend to achieve without spinning the wheels and creating almost as much damage as that which I am trying to mend.
It’s crazy-making.
It should be fun, playing in sand with my big tractor. Problem is, it is also a bit dangerous and can be costly.
Right off the bat, with the first scoop of screenings, I got stuck at the bump built up to divert water runoff at the gate into the paddock. I didn’t approach with enough momentum to get over it, and since it is downhill from the driveway, I suddenly couldn’t back up, either. The rear tires just spun when trying both directions, digging me deeper into being stuck with each attempt to coax out some progress of escape.
I ended up dumping the bucket right there and using the hydraulic loader to pry my way out of the predicament, as I have learned to do from my farmer neighbors. It would be nice if I took it as no big deal, but it pissed me off something fierce and set the negative tone for all my subsequent struggles of getting up the slopes to where I wanted to drop loads of screenings.
I couldn’t figure out the right combination of speed and power to make it up the hill with all the weight in the bucket. Halfway up the slope the rear wheels would start to lose grip and I would try to solve it with cursing.
Okay, cursing isn’t an attempt to solve the problem, it is a venting of frustration over having the problem and not succeeding in achieving a solution. But it feels like it helps.
Eventually, enough material was moved close enough to areas where it could be tossed by shovel to the spots most in need. The divots created by spinning tractor wheels were filled in and smoothed. The tractor didn’t tip over or smash into the fence, the barn posts, or the tree.
I got “back to grazing” pretty quickly and shed the negative vibe.
I suppose it’s not all that different from any kid playing in a sand box. Sometimes fun is mixed with frustration. The trick is learning how to deal with it constructively and come out ahead in the end.
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Wondering Aloud
Cyndie and I have recently found ourselves pondering the limitations of our ability to love someone out of their predicament. It gets downright frustrating to watch others destroy their own lives despite a wealth of loving family support desperately wanting to help.
Frustration Builds to Anger
I think part of the challenge for us is the struggle of overcoming anger that builds up in us from witnessing the neglect of self, and abuse of others, dished out by people in need who choose to ignore all common sense offers of assistance. By our own philosophy, we want to be sending a flood of love to all others, even if they are making us angry. That gets hard to do sometimes.
As a person who lived with a dysfunctional mindset of depression for many, many years, I recognize how self-focused a person with mental illness can become. I understand that the person with mental illness doesn’t logically perceive how much pain and sorrow they inflict on those who dearly love them, especially family. Heck, even if the message were to make it through, it could well be insufficient to inspire a change toward choosing to become healthy in response.
Yes, family seems to receive the brunt of our worst selves, even when they are the ones to whom we are most attached. Well, for that matter, even our own selves tend to become the target of our worst. That’s how these predicaments get started in the first place!
Cyndie and I understand that the only person we can change is ourselves. As a parent, it became one of the driving forces for me to want to become the healthiest I can be. I couldn’t force my children to love themselves and make healthy decisions, but I could make that a goal for myself. Doing so became an influence on my relationship with Cyndie. Our subsequent couples therapy and efforts to grow toward the healthiest possible relationship then imbued our household with that intentional energy.
I can’t say for sure that it is responsible for healthy choices our now grown children have demonstrated thus far in their lives, but I no longer see my past dysfunctional behaviors reflected back to me like I began to experience when they were young and I was ill.
Healthy Choice of Sending Love
The exercise that Cyndie and I talked about wanting to embrace last night is to emulate the confidence of our precious friend, Dunia, and not let our feelings of frustration and anger sidetrack our good intentions of wholeheartedly loving those dear to us who are not of a mind to love themselves. We want to send love with the fullest belief in the power of that love to make a healthy difference.
You see, doing so is an act of making us healthier. We can’t make others choose health. That is their responsibility. We can know we are honestly providing loving energy and by focusing on that, overcome the interference of frustration and anger over things we cannot control.
It doesn’t hurt to have a place like this blog where we can vent some extra frustration now and then. It allows us to let go of that which no longer serves and regain a balanced perspective in love.
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Frustrating Exercise
Despite my ambitious goals to accomplish many things yesterday (so I could take Cyndie up on an offer to turn my back on projects at home for a day to celebrate Memorial Day weekend with a visit to the lake) I finished far short of the plan. Now I am forced to try to get the grass mowed this morning, long before the dew has evaporated, so we can leave in the afternoon.
Complicating my efforts yesterday, and seriously hindering my progress, was a surprising and very dramatic reaction to something in the air. I started sneezing big time, and my nose began to run like a faucet. That both hindered progress and contributed to my not addressing any of the other things I had wanted to do.
On top of that, I ended up needing to make that almost obligatory return trip to Menards for supplies. I was working on patching our deck where boards have gotten soft with rot. The carpenter I called to replace them all is too busy to get to it until later, so he suggested I patch it for now. Following his simplified instructions, I quickly ran into details that required I problem solve.
It took two tries, but I figured out solutions and forged ahead, way behind schedule. Then my nose began to pour and the pry bar I used to pull nails became too worn and wouldn’t grip the nail heads. It was an exercise in managing frustration and rearranging goals. I’ll give myself a C grade for the lesson. (Mike, I needed your nail-puller and expertise!)
It was getting late, and I had all the tools spread out across the deck, so I forged ahead until after sunset to complete the task. I wanted to have one less thing left to do today, and I successfully accomplished that!
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Fighting Frustration
I know that I can just give in and stop trying to make progress when barriers repeatedly frustrate my attempts to advance toward a goal, but I seem to have an ingrained attachment to that angst of repeatedly banging my head against the problems that arise. Eventually, I will go back to grazing, but for now…
Yesterday was a day to give up and go back to bed, but I forged ahead regardless, and bashed headlong into the fruitless exercise of trying to get something done anyway. It probably wasn’t as bad as I’m making it seem, but the final straw was trying to write this post live online when our internet connection was doing an endless dance loop of resetting, creating a repeating pattern of pages hanging mid-load, and slamming the brakes on any attempts to actually achieve something productive.
Talk about frustrating! We were trying to research costs for materials for our next phase of pasture fencing, to compare with the quote we have received from our fence contractor. We also got stopped in the middle of trying to do online research for information on improving the surface of our paddocks.
The reason we were indoors doing research is because it is raining outside again. Speaking of frustration, the rain gauge revealed 2 more inches fell overnight Sunday to Monday morning. The wetness around here is crazy-making!
Since I couldn’t work on anything else, I walked right down to the wettest area of our planned grazing pasture —probably out of spite— where two dead trees had toppled over in the storm that destroyed my woodshed (I think the woodshed failure is frustrating me more than I am admitting to myself), and I started cutting them up and creating a new brush pile. Man, will it feel good to ignite that bonfire. Too bad it will have to wait for months because the pile is currently located on an area of standing water.
I let my focus wander to the drainage ditch that forms the southern border of our property, where the water of the last few storms is still flowing along in an irritatingly pleasant manner. Standing in water up to my ankles, I began the work of cutting out the 1-to-2 inch volunteer trees that were allowed to grow unchecked to clutter the ditch, making a perfect snow-stop that creates dams and backs up flow during the spring melt.
The plan is to clear the ditch, and the junk trees that have been sprouting in the area just above it, because above is where we will run the southern leg of our new grazing pasture fence.
While I was down there working, our delightful dog, Delilah, was happily exploring to and fro, prancing in the running water, and generally being a sweet companion… until she wasn’t. She disappeared on me while I was engrossed in aggravating the tendonitis in both elbows, working our ratcheting pruner to cut down the forest of unwelcome growth.
After Delilah’s performance on Sunday —moments after I had received a subtle comment from our neighbor about her frequent visits to his place— where she ran away from me to interrupt that very family’s Mother’s Day picnic on their front lawn, she has me so frustrated that I have decreed that she must be on-leash now when outside and not being directly watched.
It’s all got me plenty frustrated, I tell you, but the regression to need to leash Delilah again is at the top of the heap.
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Frustrating Lessons
I’m sorry, but I need to vent some frustration. I’ve taken on the project of building a woodshed, guided by a rudimentary plan I found on the internet, using mostly found materials, my meager collection of construction tools, and my distinct lack of experience with carpentry. One of the draws for me to undertake this effort on my own was the encouragement I read online at the site where I found the building plan, pointing out that a shed like this makes a great first attempt at constructing a building, because there are no codes to meet. Anything goes.
And what’s the worst that could happen if the shed fails? The stack of split firewood might topple over or get wet temporarily. It’s a pretty low-risk construction project.
What I am finding is, it has a high risk of causing me great frustration. Have I mentioned that I tend toward perfectionism on just this kind of task? I gotta admit, that very tendency toward perfectionism is a significant contributor to my lack of experience in doing something like building a shed out of found materials. I know in advance it is doomed from the start. Why would I choose to put myself through the exasperation?
Of course, Cyndie points out that this kind of thinking is my first problem.
I can’t argue that. I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to thinking like “the little engine that could.” It is hard to meditate on the “I think I can” mantra, when you already embody the notion that you “can’t.”
I didn’t just dive into this project willy-nilly. I hemmed and hawed over it. I trolled for friends with skills to do it for me. I let the idea of doing it myself stew for weeks, hoping time would either reveal another solution, or I’d magically become skilled by just thinking about it a lot. I thought about the materials the project would require, over and over, trying to determine the likelihood I could come up with everything I would need.
Here comes one of my first frustrations: It is only a simple woodshed. Why does my mind make it seem so complicated?
Eventually, I committed and began gathering materials. That phase took additional weeks for me to accomplish, between familiarizing myself with shopping lumber yards and making a decision on what to use.
Now, as I’ve already written about here, I have the frame up, and as you can see, the rafters in place. (Thanks are due to my friend, architect Mike Wilkus, for teaching me how to mount the rafters to a log beam… cut a “bird’s-mouth” notch in the rafter!) After the exercise of this phase, my perfectionistic traits are irritated like a raw-rubbed blister.
I know that it is in my best interest to consider things like keeping it level and square. I would love to be able to do that. As a novice, I am struggling because the only straight line I have is a piece of tightened string, and my level. The log posts and beams are imperfect. The flat rocks I picked are imperfect. The lumber I have is all warped and twisted. I rarely have been able to reference anything trustworthy.
It hardly matters to the overall structure, but it matters to me, because I notice where it is off. Drives me nuts.
I don’t like hammering nails. They go most of the way in, then stop and bend. They go all the way in, and the head breaks off. They split the wood. They somehow repel my hammer and make me leave dents in the wood, all around the nail. Just when I think I’m getting the hang of it, my hand and arm get fatigued and the nails start bending again, and the wood gets more dents in it.
I prefer screws. My screws also can split the wood. The heads strip. The screwdriver bit strips. The screw goes 90% of the way in and then seizes. Finally, the head breaks off.
Both nails and screws jump out of my hands. They fly out of the wood as I’m starting. I drop the drill-driver from the ladder. I can’t reach from where the ladder is. I don’t have scaffolding, so I am up and down that ladder an uncountable number of times. I move it back and forth, bumping the beams overhead, knocking the rafters out of place.
Can I complain about the bugs? They aren’t unique to a carpentry project, but they have been adding to my frustration in this case.
The woodshed may be a good first structure to build, but I’m thinking I should be building a boat. I found myself cursing like a sailor at the frustrations over the weekend.
Cyndie is sweet to point out, regardless my frustrations, we’ve got the majority of the project accomplished, and I have to admit, I am pleased to be getting the shed I have all along envisioned for this spot. I think it will be perfect, even if it isn’t “perfect.”
Relative Something 