I had two deadlines this past weekend and managed to make neither one. I had asked for time to get the firewood that was given to me earlier hauled off from the land near the house, but Saturday was when I was supposed to have finished that. Needless to say, I've hauled out numerous loads, but there are still two or three there that I had hoped to get moved.

What with the recent rain and all, it's been a bit on the muddy side. But it was plenty dry on Saturday, I just had too much other stuff to get done. With firewood being my main source of heat in the cold months, it is very important for me that I get as much as I can as quickly as I can. After all, everything I don't burn up this year I'll need to get started next year. But firewood is not the only show in town. I also have several other things on the table right now, like getting the spare room ready with a new closet door and rod and getting the house I bought finished so that I finally can decide what might happen to it in the future. There are pluses and minuses to any course of action I might decide to take.

Renting means sure money now, but involves a certain amount of risk. Selling means that I am in a position to come out well, but I might be faced with the problem of paying for heat and lights until a buyer comes along. Neither option seems perfect and the future, as always, is unclear.

I had through Sunday to get the house ready to show to a potential renter. I didn't get the bathroom put back together, as I had hoped.

I fell behind in trying to get the tubs refinished, which someone had painted white, but the finish was peeling. Underneath was harvest gold, which just isn't as popular as it once was. The stripper that I used to get the stuff off the tub was pretty intense. That could be taken more than one way. I mean I bought a chemical agent to clear away the old paint. Most of the paint came off easily, but the rest required a couple of hours with some steel wool and plenty of elbow grease.

I hated to show the place with the bathroom in disarray, but I had little choice. I did manage to get the pipes installed to the pressure tank in the kitchen. I hope to have the water turned on at some point this week. All I need to do that is enough time and courage to creep beneath the house and make an electrical connection for the pump switch. To be honest, I'm a little apprehensive. On the bright side, the house appears to have a version of flexible tube plumbing which is very durable and not likely to rupture when frozen.

On the other hand, I've not seen the water run out of anything yet and I can imagine that there is the potential for a great many problems.

My next major deadline is coming up at the first of the month, by which time I am trying to get everything in 'ship shape' and ready for inhabitants.

I try to keep up, but when you're the kind of person who always tries to take on more and more stuff, you can never really every finish. In other words, if I always add things to my plate at a rate faster than I can eat, something will invariably be in danger of falling off the edges. Maybe that's not so bad, really. After all, an idle mind isn't a good thing. It can also leave one missing a few fingers if the mind kicks out of gear while operating saws and such.

I had an 'idle mind day' of the negative kind last weekend when I went to cut firewood and arrived only to find that I had loaded the gas and not the oil. After cutting some four or five logs, I ended up running out of gas and having to load up and go home to get the oil. After I got my oil and returned, I then was sawing through an old log and hit something inside a hollow place without knowing it was there, leaving my saw so dull that smoke was soon rising from the log I was trying to cut. I had to wait for the bar to cool before I could even change the chain, then I went ahead and refilled everything and tried again.

I then had a very large tree that I was cutting up and realized after cutting several pieces that I could barely lift it up high enough to get it on the truck. Since I didn't have enough time to cut the logs smaller, I ended up rolling them down the hill to the truck and 'toughening up.' I was hefting them onto my knee, then standing upright, then rolling them onto the tailgate. As I got the truck more full, I had to heft them over the side. I wondered if I would get a couple of them up and over the top.

I was so worn out—as much from my own mistakes as from lifting the wood—by the time I got finished that I didn't know if I would be able to get the truck unloaded. I did manage to get finished, but it was well after dark before I shuffled in the house covered in dust and dirt.

You know it's funny, but no matter how hard I work, I always seem to have enough strength left in my body to finish. It's the feelings of fatigue, the physical pain and the desire to give up that I have to overcome most of the time. In other words, most things are little more than a mind game. I might try to get more done than I should, but it's a motivational tool that keeps me working. A dose of motivation is much better than a bottle of medecine.
 

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