Plateaus

You know how it is when you're trying to lose weight? You start off with great convictions. The weight comes off until you hit a plateau. Then you just feel stuck! Do you just give up and get fat! Lower your expectations?! What! Where do you go from here? What do you try?

Now before you suggest a colon cleanse, I want you to realize that I am using this as a metaphor on where I am at with the little farm. And where I am at is....STUCK!! I can't seem to get anything done! I go through these spells at regular intervals. Each more frustrating then the last. I beat myself up with to-do lists, the calendar and weather reports and yet I have just remained stuck. Self flagellation has not been a positive method of motivation.

I was going to try a new direction and only work on tasks that have a serious "cringe" factor. Then I realized that the jobs that were left were the jobs that made me cringe to think about doing them. Bugger! So no cajoling my way through the icky stuff and rewarding myself with the happy tasks. We're pretty much down to just "icky".

I guess the best I can hope for is to try and get one thing done per day and call that good. So for today? Well, we have had a week of cold, miserable rain. So, I will start by pumping water out of the outdoor fireplace footing and then finish digging it out and start filling it up with rock and getting it tamped in good. It will take all day to get the rock hauled a bucket at a time. The outdoor kitchen is something that I have looked forward to more then the house building, so I am probably just tripping over all the emotion that I have invested. Tripping over all of those visions of sitting out by the fire on a chilly night with friends and a bottle of wine. The fire snapping and jumping and turning cheeks rosy...... then I look out the window at a cold, wet mud hole.

Oh well, (sigh) I'll get off this plateau. Getting the fireplace footing done will be like losing five pounds! Finishing the arbor top, that'll be another five pounds! Setting the posts for the roof over the outdoor kitchen... another five pounds! Getting the footing done under the hobbit house? That puppy will be worth about fifty freakin' pounds!!!

By the time this place is done, I'm going to be one of those skinny mean broads.

Louie