Saturday, October 8, 2011

Sensitive Geek MAN: Our house is a very very very fine mess

One of the glories of home ownership is that you never really have nothing to do ever again. Not to say that there aren't times when I do nothing, just that it now is a choice rather than an actual lack.

Someone asked me the other day is I have a honeydo list. Not really, I said. More like a battle plan. Keeping our house in some sort of repair is a fairly consistent job. On top of that, the slow transformation of our house from a place we bought from others to the place we live adds even more work to the pile.

For example, we had a shed in back. It was not a well built shed, but it served its purpose. Unfortunately, last year, all manner of critter decided to start living underneath it. I tried everything I could think of to encourage them to stop, but they always came back. I'd get rid of one, a new one would come; I'd block off one hole, 2 more would pop up. It was a battle, one I would have been content to keep fighting indefinitely if most of the residents hadn't been skunks.
You don't mess with skunks.
So, I finally just tore the shed down. I won the war against the critters, but now I don't have a shed. All that stuff needs to go somewhere. So now it's in the garage, which means that the newest battle is to get the garage organized so we can actually walk around in there.
Those are the battles.

The transformations to where we live are choices we make to change things about the house that aren't really broken, but that we don't prefer. For example, my wife doesn't like our front and back doors. I want a garden. I also want a better, bigger patio. Those things are very slow, and about the time we finish them, it will be time to move, and then it will start all over.

Luckily, I usually like this sort of work, even the battles (mostly). I just wish that I got to do more of it by choice rather than necessity. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. What they mean is that the things that need to be done that we don't want to do make us desperate to find better, faster, more efficient ways to do them so that then we can spend the time we saved doing the things we actually want to do.

Which is why we build robots.

2 comments: