Posts Tagged ‘perfectionism compromise’
It’s Starting
In September, the shortening of days becomes more noticeable. The temperature swings between morning and afternoon force clothing adjustments from jackets to shirt sleeves. Tree leaves begin to reveal that their growing season is coming to an end.
The tops of some of our trees are starting to show some orange. Cyndie has set our thermostat to “Auto” to cool the house if the daytime gets too warm and bring heat when the nights get too chilly. Schools are in session, and fall sports are underway.
Advertisers peddling goods via Christmas themes won’t be far behind.
I experimented with relaxing my perfectionistic tendencies yesterday in order to get enough mowing done to feel like our place is ready for us to be gone for a week. The grass remained damp enough that it was difficult to get a grip with the riding mower’s tires.
It didn’t feel like I had time to carefully navigate sideways slopes, so there was a fair amount of failure to keep the free-spinning front wheels of the zero-turn from uncontrolled turns downhill. It was a haphazard, frequently circular route to getting all the grass blades trimmed.
The wet soil and slippery grass resulted in a far greater occurrence of spinning wheels when I simply wanted to execute a turn. Normally, this causes me a lot of angst and a fair amount of foul language, and inspires me to try many ways to prevent it from happening. Not yesterday, though.
I chose the alternative of not caring in an effort to accomplish the greater goal of having the whole place mowed before we leave. I’m the only one who will even notice the increased number of skid marks.
It’s September. People’s attention will be on the trees, not on the dirt marks in our grass.
.
.
Plans Obliterated
As soon as my health took a turn for the better, I began to care about all the events my illness has forced us to cancel. While I was feeling miserable, I didn’t care about anything but enduring the misery. I completely missed out on watching the NBA Minnesota Timberwolves blow out the Denver Nuggets by 45 points on Thursday night.
Good thing I was feeling better last night so I could watch them score their lowest first-half points for the entire season. I suffer that terrible fan affliction in spectator sports. The games I’m able to see my teams play are too often lousy and the ones I miss are the ones that turn out great.
Turned out last night’s game was one of the rare exceptions of that theme. Biggest game 7 comeback in NBA history. Whaaat?!! Go Wolves!
Cyndie and I lost the opportunity for a dinner out with family on Friday night and then a 100th-anniversary event at one of our old hometown schools on Saturday. Brunch with friends on Sunday was a bust.
Most frustrating, my plan to mow some portion of our property every day during the season of fastest growth suddenly came to an abrupt halt. That meant more than four days of unchecked grass blade growth.
I got out of bed yesterday morning, took a shower to wash a couple of days of fever off of me, and put on my work clothes. It was time to mow.
After a few days of feeling too sick to care, I carried some of that absence of concern forward with the difficulty of mowing tall grass. Tossing away my usual perfectionistic tendencies, I did my best with a single pass and didn’t let it bug me when the result was downright ugly.
The goal was to get as many of the areas knocked down with what I’ll call a “rough cut” so that I could return in a day or two (pending the rain in our forecast) to mow another time to my usual high standards.
That area in the outflow of the culvert has been so wet this spring that I couldn’t cut it until now. Too bad now it is too tall for my lawnmowers. However, we do have other tools to choose from. This area will get the power trimmer treatment. The good thing about the string trimmer is that it cuts just fine even when the grass is a little wet.
For the rest of the week, I’m making no plans to have anything go as planned.
Rock Fitting
On the way to the lake yesterday, we dropped Asher off for his in-residence training and he accepted the unfamiliar surroundings without complaint.
Asher is barely visible in the far pen beyond the front area occupied by a dog he didn’t yet know. He passed by this front dog with a brief check, and receiving no response, he decided to ignore it and move on to sniffing every surface in his pen.
We felt it was a great start. Satisfied Asher was in good hands, we hopped in our car and drove the rest of the way to the lake without him.
While we are up here, we are planning to add a finishing touch to the old cabin where the log guys cut off the bottom of rotting logs in March. Having a large stash of faux rocks at home, we brought some up for the job.
These rocks had spent some time as markers in our labyrinth and as a result, developed a layer of dirt that needed to be removed.
That’s fine. We had some time to spare.
After cleaning them up and spreading the rocks out so we could see them, we tried mocking up the layouts for each space.
It seemed like a good plan to me. We felt encouraged by the process and figured the hard work was all behind us. The next phase involved a new adhesive from Techniseal called Stickystone. It is a fast-setting vertical hardscape adhesive.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well as my test case back at home. A few rocks had fallen off the foundation of the house in Beldenville so I tested the Stickystone to reattach them and it worked with ease.
For some reason that I haven’t figured out, getting the adhesive to hold the rocks in place up here is only successful about half the time. After completing two of the five surfaces, we were using up the limited supply of adhesive too fast and my patience was dwindling.
We had spent so much time cleaning and prepping that the mounting and remounting had pushed us past the dinner hour. We were tired and hungry and I was very frustrated. Our remedy was a trip to Coop’s Pizza for dinner.
If it’s not too rainy this morning, we’ll try hanging more rocks until the adhesive runs out. I will be looking to focus on the outlook that partial progress is better than no progress at all.
Come to think of it, that’s also one way we will be considering Asher’s training while he is away.
.
.
Relative Something 