A matter of balance
Getting through a day usually takes a balance of two different kinds of work. One is really work, you’ve got your head in it deeply, trying to word a document, edit a picture or video. They all do wear you out, sometimes in shorter order than other activities.
Well, once your head is shot for useful thought, you get out of the room for a while. Sometimes you’ve got a meal to eat, a dishwasher to load or unload, or both. This is light mental activity, remembering where things go in the kitchen or the washer. Decisions, decisions. And the litter box is smelly, so you have to wade into that. Two pee pads and bag of poop later you’ve got that under control.
But out of the house, there are weeds along the driveway, street, or the sidewalk to knock back. There’s always the lawnmower to direct along the lines. I always let my grass grow long, so its easy to see the cut lines, where I’ve been and where I need to go. The wife has a row of plants back by the fence. To keep a row between them and the fence I measured each one at least 4 feet off the fence, usually at 6-foot intervals between plants. Works quite well in the mowing and weed eating phases.
For a mower, my brother in law gave us a lawnmower for a wedding and housewarming present. “Self-propelled, please” I said. One summer I spent cutting grass around two suburbs east of town. The boss said one thing that made good sense to me- a mower you push, you push into the ground. A self-propelled mower you simply direct where to go. So, here I am with my trusty MD.com mower. The Boomers among you will remember the name Briggs & Stratton mowers. This is one of those, just MD bought up Briggs & Stratton years ago. Still a trusty dependable machine.
There’s a balance here. In your office your thinking heavily, making creative decisions constantly, and it gets old, gets you head-tired. So to keep yourself sane, you go after house or yard work. Nowhere near as intense head work, you know. At the end of the day, you feel like you’ve knocked out a bunch of tasks, and indeed you have. It feels good to have been so productive!
In the early days of living at the house, I bought into the battery-operated weed eater/edger thing. For each tool there was a battery and a charger, so getting both meant two chargers. Bought some extra batteries to keep going, and it worked well for a few years. I had been told you could turn the weed eater on its side and edge. Who ever said that didn’t have weeds like mine. They LAUGHED at the string I threw at em. Hence the steel blade edger, No laughing now, they got cut out of the way. Thing is, that ate a battery in no time, so I was frequently going back and exchanging batteries, which got old. After that, batteries got more expensive, then they died after 2–3 years. Well, I got $60 for the weed eater and edger battery and charger included. Goodbye, batteries, on to gas operated machinery! Another new pleasure is the smell of 2 cycle exhaust. Raised around motorboats and ski boats, some 2 cycle, some 4, I smell that smoke and it takes me back to my youth and skiing and fun in the summer.
The heat in the summer makes you schedule yard work early, going until you feel a little tired. Then you shower up and get back into the office during the hotter part of the day. Some activities wear you down faster than others, especially when it involves software that does not want to behave and allow for smooth operation. This especially involved Lightroom for me. LR seems to make saving a piece of work a toilsome deed. I had a lot easier time with Photoshop, so that’s where I do my picture work. I pay Adobe a decent monthly fee to use their work, but updates are included in that. I have had video editing software that got prohibitive on updates, so I sold it. Yes, the learning is intense, with so much to learn, but was worth it to me.
A particularly pleasurable activity for me is writing, sometimes. If I have an idea, I can get into the flow and see where it goes. Sometimes its good to put down the thoughts, log the work and close it out. They call that Journaling, I am told. Kids like me called it keeping a diary. I didn’t do it so much in younger years but laying down the thoughts now helps me get it out of my head, stored safely somewhere. Gives me a chance to react to life, to people, to events, etc. Everybody reacts slightly differently to things. In the four Gospels in the New Testament, there is only one miracle that made it into all four- the feeding of the 5000. Each person is created ever so similar, and ever so different from the next.
That, folks, is how I do a day.
