I stole that pun from the bag of cement mix that I picked up at the hardware store this morning during my first “outdoor activity” appointment.
Yesterday I wrote that I’d be slipping into an effort of timeboxing my unscheduled days to ensure that I wasn’t slipping into a post-employment slouch pattern involving too many video games or regretfully considering that I should be doing one thing while I was occupied with another.
As a side note there should be a term for that: feeling like you should be, say, practicing your musical instrument while you’re instead walking the dog, or pondering the idea of, say, mowing the grass while you are instead reading a book. Both are valid options, but you feel guilty for doing one versus the other so much that you don’t commit to the one you are doing and instead pine for the other, sometimes so debilitating that you end up doing neither: like, Waffling About Relative Productivity, or WARP.
I was WARPing too much, so I set up a schedule (see the previous link) and so now I can go off and focus on a “creative session” or a “dog walk” or a round of “yard work” and stop thinking I should be over there doing that instead of doing what I’m doing.
That’s a long way of saying that I timeboxed being outside which led me to going to the hardware store and buying a four by six by ten foot fence post and a bag of cement mix called “Post Haste” presumably because it is (a) for fence posts and (b) sets quickly. Hardy-har-har.
About fifteen years ago when my previous-previous neighbour built his section of fence around the rest of his yard (not our adjoining properties) he decided that the section I’d built two years prior along the property line was not long enough for his tastes. I’d built it about four meters past the back corner of my house towards the front and capped it closed. He added another meter and a half to the length (closer to the front) and capped his side closed. In effect, we were left with this two different fence lines facing the road, though I’ve been excessively lazy and couldn’t have cared less about the aesthetics of the whole thing.
Except, it occurred to me a couple months ago that for the cost of a single fence post I could repurpose the wood from the little end cap and extend my side that extra meter and a half closer to the front.
Am I explaining this in a way that makes any sense?
In effect, I just put a new “front” fence post in to align with where my (long since moved away) neighbour put his “front” fence post, which until today were offset by about a meter and a half. I’ll unscrew the boards and move them to the new post. Voila! The fence is now aesthetically improved, and I have an extra meter and a half of space inside my fence line for storage and stuff.
And thus my first timeboxed day of yard work has been very, very productive.
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