Sex, drugs and rock -n- roll

Did you think this blog was going to be about sex, drugs and rock -n- roll?  I entitled this entry as such just to draw you in, and since you are here you might as well finish reading.  What I really want to discuss are home projects and all the work that goes into driving them to completion.  Sound fun?  Keep reading.....

On a regular basis I have in mind certain projects around the house I want to start and finish.  Typically, and I'm embracing my DNA/gender here, I start more projects than I can manage or complete in a timely fashion.  This drives my wife insane, which leads to arguments, which leads to her winning the arguments, which ultimately leads to me hiring someone to finish my projects.  Everybody wins!

Our most recent projects include repainting the entire hacienda, finishing a drywall project and repainting the mistakes I made the first time around, painting bathroom cabinets, massive amounts of yardwork, packing a lot of our crap for our vacation/retirement home in Alabama and cleaning out the old mulch in our Japanese garden/flower bed (if you will) and replacing it with new mulch. 

As with most projects, there is a substantial amount of heavy lifting going on--that's my job.  The more delicate task of having a vision of what the project should look like then supervising it is her job.  The recent mulch project, though, was a shared venture leading to both of  us feeling our age and whining for two days about how sore we were.

Now, as I said, the scope of the mulching project was to clean out the Japanese garden and replace the old with the new.  Ultimately, Cathy's vision encompassed putting new mulch around three sides of the house--that's twenty-four bags, each bag approximately two yards of mulch--you do the math.  There's not a net weight noted on each bag, but let me just say that carrying twenty-four bags of mulch at approximately two yards each weighed about one double hernia.  Yeah, that about sums it up.  They also weighed about two arguments because I wanted to stop the project in front of the house.  Lastly, they weighed two thunderstorms because that's what we waded through in order to complete this little project. 

While her vision was to mulch three sides of the house, my vision was to complete a few feet of the front, take a break and contemplate finishing the rest of one side the next day.  Shaming me into finishing the front, we pushed forward until it was done.  Then the idea to mulch another side popped up and so on and so forth. 

It's not that I'm lazy or anything, but I like to take breaks and think about our next move.  Rather than label me as a slug, I prefer to consider myself a "strategic planner and laborer."  Whenever she sees me sitting, perhaps sipping on some cold, refreshing beverage and asks, "What are you doing," I promptly respond with, "Planning, baby....planning."

But we finished the mulching project and that's a good thing.  Today my beloved is traveling and I have a list of things to complete.  Right now, I'm planning........

And so it goes.