So much to do, so little time to want to do it.
Yes, the summer jobs around the house loom. They haunt me in my sleep, calling me and taunting me. “You’ll never finish us. You’ll start three and quit after getting a splinter, sissy boy.”
It’s quite frightening to get visited by these ghostly visions on a nightly basis. Lawnmowers that need oil changes. Trees that need trimming. Talking pipes and a belching bucket of plaster that eats a ham sandwich and throws putty knives at me.
“You’ll never start us!”
A driveway. The unfinished plants by the street. Some plastering in the baby’s room. An upgrade to the backyard spigot. A shower each morning. Grass that makes my neighbors jealous. A cure for cancer made from butterfly bushes. A ladder to the sun. Figuring out what all that crap is on my desk. Throwing out all that crap on my desk. Banishing weeds to Oklahoma. Developing a magnet that will repel leaves and dust from my front porch so I don’t have to sweep anymore.
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Very realistic. Very doable. Very critical. And only about one-tenth will come close to getting done. Hopefully, but I can’t promise anything, a shower each morning will make the cut. (As I sit here writing this, I’ve already failed that one.)
How did summer get here so fast? I thought I had time. Time to plan and procrastinate. Time to get some started early, before the heat came on. But it’s here. Summer is here!
Why is it people who have lived in Florida all of their lives and know how hot it gets never have the common sense to get jobs out of the way while it’s still cool? That astounds me. We always push it off until the summer.
Need to climb up into the attic to work on some wiring? Well, that would be a perfect summer job. Wait until it’s about 280 degrees up there and capable of cooking your internal organs like roasted turkey giblets.
Need to work on a shiny tin roof that can fry a human being like a strip of bacon? No, not December when it’s chilly and overcast. Has to be late June when the glare alone can burn out your retinas and set fire to all the hair on your body.
Wait until the summer when it’s only ever cool for about 20 minutes deep in the middle of the night, and even then, it will melt the elastic in your underwear.
But summer always seems the appropriate time to do it. And so far away that you can talk endlessly about all you plan to do, then hope your wife forgets by the time it gets here. It never seems to get here. Summer is always forever away, like the horizon line while driving along a desert-stretch of New Mexico. It stretches out infinitely in front of you, never quite in your grasp no matter how far you drive. It’s nice that way, only … BAM! Then it hits, and it’s an avalanche of projects, plus new ones.
And your wife does remember. She remembers everything you said. “So, that two-story addition you talked about,” she says, “that’s still going to happen, right?”
Uh …
“When are you going to start those hurricane shutters you talked about doing this summer? Hurricane season starts soon.”
Oh …
“Remember you mentioned you wanted to do that all-marble bath with massage jets and gold-plated fixtures? You said it would be a piece of cake.”
Yeah … did I say this summer? Actually, I meant NEXT summer. This summer I have to get up in the attic, and I’ll be in the hospital three weeks after that as they try to re-hydrate me and give me new organs.
So much to do, yet so little time to want to do it.