Chore-Medley

With a nod to Dream Theater, this week was a variety of chore type things. For me this can be frustrating as the project list is a mile long and growing every day. So this is my attempt to justify it to myself as well as do some reflection. Which is another thing which needs work. Maybe this helps you look in the mirror as well, or at least lets you know that the mundane is still a requirement.

First was the dreaded shopping trips. With the snow storm, we have been using our supplies and not restocking. So this was the weekend for trips to Costco, the grocery store, the home improvement store, and a place to get a haircut. None of those I would consider something I enjoy (ok maybe I like the home improvement store), but all were necessary and with the not so great weather it was a good time to get those out of the way.

We painted my wife’s office a week ago and while we got a lot of the stuff moved around from the office we shared and the garage, there were still things in various places. We finished moving those items into the correct spaces. It has made our individual offices a little more cluttered, but it cleared out our main living space and sets us up now to figure out the best way to organize. There will be some builds coming out of that for my office/studio space soon.

We had our apple and flowering cherry trees pruned a few weeks ago and the branches from the flowering cherry were on our front lawn. The rain let up long enough on Saturday that I was able to drag those out to an area in the pasture where there was the start of a burn pile. Now it is a medium sized pile and our lawn will be happier for it. Plus it is now not such an eye sore. At least that part isn’t. Still on the list is to get the construction trash from the summer hauled away. I also pulled down two large branches that came down during our snow storm, which would have started affecting the grass on our drain field. We are looking at next weekend to do the burn and I’m going to see if I can get some bio char out of that for the compost pile. I’m trying to incorporate permaculture ideas into our property and this will help with keeping the waste stream from leaving the property.

The last one feels kind of silly, but I’ll have to admit it helps my mental frame when heading into a week at work. That is general house cleaning. We are working on making more of our meals at home, but one of the issues with doing that is that there always seems to be dishes. There are two of us and it seems the dish washer is running every night, yet dishes still remain. Same with just general life stuff. Mail, things from the store, and leftover items from tasks being accomplished just accumulate on every horizontal surface. So we just took care of getting those back in their places. Plus cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the floor. Again it is pretty routine, but I think it gets overlooked in how it affects your mental state. That reset makes it easier to go to sleep without the physical and mental clutter. We ended up having our youngest daughter stop by for dinner and some Skip-Bo (by the way, pretty fun), so that probably helped a good deal as well.

Overall, not my greatest post of all time, but it documents my thoughts for this week and hey, let’s be honest, they won’t all be chart topping hits. But hopefully, you can take solace in the fact that sometimes you just have to do mundane things to be in a place where you can do more. This is the documenting of my journey even if it isn’t all glamorous. I’ll leave you with some music to check out. It is a new album from an instrumental metal artist, Intervals, and the new release Circadian. I have seen the band twice now and Aaron Marshall puts together awesome riffs in great songs, so check it out. Smaller artists can definitely use the support right now.