Posts Tagged ‘Sisyphean’
Braving Futility
What is with the gall of these poison ivy sprouts brazenly making a move into the mowed path along the western fence line of the back pasture?
Is nothing sacred?
Don’t bother answering that; it was a rhetorical question. I know the way nature works. My attempts to wrangle the persistent growth on 20 acres into submission are basically Sisyphean futility.
Speaking of futile… I failed to reach success in an attempt to retrieve data from a remote hard drive with a broken USB connector. A local guy had been advertising his tech services heavily on the neighborhood app, “Nextdoor.” Cyndie suggested I contact him to see if he could help. We like to support the local businesses.
I was so happy to connect with him that I neglected to clarify that all my devices are Apple. Turns out his first strength is PCs. Still, a hard drive is a hard drive, and he took a shot at communicating with the Western Digital drive using a docking station and two of his software tools. No go. We decided to try plugging his docking station directly into my iMac, but the drive was not recognized.
It became obvious that the intermediate circuit board from which the USB connector broke, which we had been hoping to work around, performs some necessary role in communicating with the drive. That realization led me to search for a replacement assembly and/or forum discussions related to my dilemma. It turns out that the little surface-mount mini USB connector has broken off its circuit board for plenty of other folks, as well.
Buying a replacement connector won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible. Finding a way to have a skilled person solder the 5 teeny tiny pins onto the itsy bitsy pads on the board will require a fair amount of research and likely a strong dose of sweet-talking. The number of retail options for this kind of work is pretty small in this neck of the woods.
I’ve got my work cut out for me on this one. It would sure be handy if I still worked for a business that did this kind of thing every day.
What was I thinking, moving so far away?
Don’t bother answering that.
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Sisyphean Endeavors
Happy World Labyrinth Day! Even though I had mowed the center of the labyrinth pathway with the push mower, a lot of tall grass remained around the rocks where the mower blade couldn’t reach. Ever the perfectionist, I was unable to resist the urge to do a little touch-up with our battery-powered string trimmer. The more I worked, the more I noticed additional areas deserving a trim.
The next thing you know, I had walked back to the shop to get the gas-powered string trimmer in order to trim around both sides of the rock barriers for the entire length of the circuitous path. This is not a zero-time exercise. While I was toiling away on this struggle to get the spinning plastic line into every nook and cranny without constantly breaking off because of impact with rocks, it occurred to me how Sisyphean the activity is.
My life is a Sisyphean effort to control nature’s endless tendencies. The rock always rolls back down whenever it nears the top.
When the sun shines in the spring, every growing thing takes off at breakneck speed toward achieving maximum potential. When I try to control where we want some things to grow or where we don’t want other plants to grow at all, the universe laughs.
It never ceases to amaze me that blades of grass can push up through the asphalt along the edges of our driveway.
The other winless battle I wage is against the flow of water. Try as I might, I cannot convince water to only flow where I want it to go. Water will not flow uphill; that seems easy enough. However, water will gladly choose any alternate route that offers less resistance to a lower elevation at a given moment.
Every spring, I try to shape the ground to guide snowmelt or rain runoff away from the paddock gates. Every spring, that effort ultimately fails.
At least I get to enjoy how things look for the brief day or two after I’ve rolled the symbolic rock most of the way up the hill.
Cyndie has prepared a few treats for refreshments, and I intend to light a small campfire by the labyrinth for our “Walk as One at 1:00” today. Feel free to send your own beams of peace pondering into the universal consciousness wherever you find yourself at 1:00 p.m. in your local time zone. The wave has already started traveling around the globe on this first Saturday in May in the year 2025.
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Wintervale Road
In a day-long deja vu yesterday, it felt a bit like pushing a rock up a hill to repeat everything I accomplished the day before, plowing and shoveling to clear snow from the driveway and walkways. I’m thinking I should change the way I think about that 900-foot ribbon of pavement between the road and our house. It’s more like a road than a driveway. I have christened it, “Wintervale Road.”
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The snowbanks along the edges have officially reached a height too high for my ATV plow blade to spray snow into the ditch. Now the chunks of snow just roll back onto the driveway road behind me.
We aren’t expecting additional snow in the next week, so I catch a break there, but it doesn’t look like temperatures will be warm enough to melt down any of the mountains of snow that have piled up.
I did a little experimenting with knocking down the snowbanks using a hand shovel. It was easier than I anticipated to accomplish good progress but the reality remains that it’s a long road to be doing it by hand. However, in the summer, we worked on pulling up the gravel along the shoulder by hand for the entire 900-foot length, so it’s not something that is beyond my way of making incremental progress.
There remains plenty to be done before I can even think about chipping away on that task. I need to pull the snow off our roof, shovel the piles that develop below, and then plow around the hay shed and in front of the barn.
After that, it becomes a battle of the lure of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle versus toiling away on trimming back the snowbanks on Wintervale Road.
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Relative Something 