Frustration equals opportunity
Luckily the weather yesterday was a little warmer albeit wet and I've been able to do a few things around the house, but I'm anxiously waiting for that phone call from the dealership. Chappy is still there, the campground is now open and I'm missing it!
Hopefully we'll have him out there by the weekend and in the meantime I've been able to work on some projects around the house besides Lego. I put a new battery in the mower and cut the grass, worked on a new bedside table I'm building, got further refinishing an old radio, and put together most of what I need to fix the under mount for the kitchen sink.
I find it is hard to sustain work on any one particular project because, despite my planning, I always seem to run into a situation where I don't have everything I require and need to pick up something from the store. Take the bedside table for example; I had all of the pieces cut, planed, initially sanded and I was ready to glue up the top when I found I needed a couple more clamps. No big deal, you can never have enough clamps so I picked up some more. Then I arranged all of the pieces for the top and grabbed a bottle of glue only to find that the freezing temperatures in the garage over the winter had turned it into a bottle shaped glob, my spare bottle too.
The sink, the radio, the table, the mower: Every single project needed something more to complete than what I had planned before I started.
I often find the same thing when camping. Despite my lists, days of planning, checking and rechecking, inevitably there is something that gets left out or wasn't anticipated. If you let it get to you it can be tremendously frustrating, however if you work to keep that from happening the best you can and accept that it will most likely happen anyway you can turn it into something more it can be rewarding.
How can you turn it into something more? Well, you don't force it to. When we reached GA last month and knew we had to patch the gaping hole where our vent cover was, we needed supplies we didn't plan for. We took that as an opportunity to explore the local area. While we were out we ate at a restaurant we never would have found, came upon a Lego set at Walmart that is almost impossible to find in the store, expanded our tool kit for the trailer and met some great people in the process. That frustration with the vent problem was turned around into an opportunity and we'll remember it for a long time to come.
Hopefully we'll have him out there by the weekend and in the meantime I've been able to work on some projects around the house besides Lego. I put a new battery in the mower and cut the grass, worked on a new bedside table I'm building, got further refinishing an old radio, and put together most of what I need to fix the under mount for the kitchen sink.
I find it is hard to sustain work on any one particular project because, despite my planning, I always seem to run into a situation where I don't have everything I require and need to pick up something from the store. Take the bedside table for example; I had all of the pieces cut, planed, initially sanded and I was ready to glue up the top when I found I needed a couple more clamps. No big deal, you can never have enough clamps so I picked up some more. Then I arranged all of the pieces for the top and grabbed a bottle of glue only to find that the freezing temperatures in the garage over the winter had turned it into a bottle shaped glob, my spare bottle too.
The sink, the radio, the table, the mower: Every single project needed something more to complete than what I had planned before I started.
I often find the same thing when camping. Despite my lists, days of planning, checking and rechecking, inevitably there is something that gets left out or wasn't anticipated. If you let it get to you it can be tremendously frustrating, however if you work to keep that from happening the best you can and accept that it will most likely happen anyway you can turn it into something more it can be rewarding.
How can you turn it into something more? Well, you don't force it to. When we reached GA last month and knew we had to patch the gaping hole where our vent cover was, we needed supplies we didn't plan for. We took that as an opportunity to explore the local area. While we were out we ate at a restaurant we never would have found, came upon a Lego set at Walmart that is almost impossible to find in the store, expanded our tool kit for the trailer and met some great people in the process. That frustration with the vent problem was turned around into an opportunity and we'll remember it for a long time to come.
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