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snousleHaven't had much inclination to write lately. This is not unexpected; there's a lot to do and not a lot happening.
Sometimes other people write the things I'd like to have written myself, saving me a lot of trouble. Here's a story about a guy who moved out to the desert and went mostly off-grid. His move is more radical than mine, but much of what he writes rings true. I particularly liked this comment:
I ask Carl what he'll do if the price of gas becomes too expensive for UPS to take his packages. "When things go badly, the urban person says: 'This isn't fair,'" Carl said. "In a rural area, you say: 'Of course things go wrong'. Things usually break out here, and when they do, you fix it. It's a bad thing about fuel prices, but I'm sure we can come up with an individualized solution for our problems."
This is one of the things I like about the country: the city seems full of helpless pessimism, while people out here know how to figure things out for themselves. Often with far fewer resources than city people have available to them.
I find myself being kind of moody lately. With the move complete and a modest but steady income stream from John's pension to pay the bills, the temptation to just stop and do nothing is enormous. So enormous that it's hard to relax - pausing for a moment makes me panic that I might never start up again.
It would have been possible in this project to retire completely - build a smaller house, downsize our possessions, pocket the difference, and never have to work again. I always knew that possibility, but chose the ambitious path instead. And I think that, in the long run, was obviously the right decision. But with a to-do list containing hundreds of items, boxes everywhere, and a whole lot of finish carpentry to complete, it all seems crushing.
True, every day gets something done, and there are thousands of days to get things done in. But dang, everything takes so freaking long. Take trimming the caulk and scraping the stray varnish from the windows, for instance. In theory, it seems easy enough. But each window has nine panes, and our back doors alone have almost forty. The total linear distance comes to thousands of feet! It's the kind of job you just can't see the end of, so rather than a goal, it becomes a hobby. Hell, it's practically a lifestyle unto itself. I spend about an hour a day with a bucket, a rag, and a razor blade, ever-so-carefully cutting away the caulk. With no vision of completion, cleaning one pane at a time is a real stress reducer. But it's also just one of more than two hundred tasks on the list, each one taking roughly three times as long as one might reasonably guess.
I repeatedly hear people say that they can't imagine having a five-year plan. Neither can I, but for entirely different reasons; this project is now at three and a half years, and we're barely started. It doesn't even make sense with an outlook of less than a decade. Twenty years is more like it.
Don't ever use the word "just". Really. Whenever a project demands that you "just" do this or "just" do that, you know that you've found the really hard part. The hard part is invariably the part that you dismissed because it seemed so trivial at the time. Whenever you hear the word "just", replace it with "tediously", or "expensively", or "with heroic persistence", because that's what it's going to be like.
Sometimes other people write the things I'd like to have written myself, saving me a lot of trouble. Here's a story about a guy who moved out to the desert and went mostly off-grid. His move is more radical than mine, but much of what he writes rings true. I particularly liked this comment:
I ask Carl what he'll do if the price of gas becomes too expensive for UPS to take his packages. "When things go badly, the urban person says: 'This isn't fair,'" Carl said. "In a rural area, you say: 'Of course things go wrong'. Things usually break out here, and when they do, you fix it. It's a bad thing about fuel prices, but I'm sure we can come up with an individualized solution for our problems."
This is one of the things I like about the country: the city seems full of helpless pessimism, while people out here know how to figure things out for themselves. Often with far fewer resources than city people have available to them.
I find myself being kind of moody lately. With the move complete and a modest but steady income stream from John's pension to pay the bills, the temptation to just stop and do nothing is enormous. So enormous that it's hard to relax - pausing for a moment makes me panic that I might never start up again.
It would have been possible in this project to retire completely - build a smaller house, downsize our possessions, pocket the difference, and never have to work again. I always knew that possibility, but chose the ambitious path instead. And I think that, in the long run, was obviously the right decision. But with a to-do list containing hundreds of items, boxes everywhere, and a whole lot of finish carpentry to complete, it all seems crushing.
True, every day gets something done, and there are thousands of days to get things done in. But dang, everything takes so freaking long. Take trimming the caulk and scraping the stray varnish from the windows, for instance. In theory, it seems easy enough. But each window has nine panes, and our back doors alone have almost forty. The total linear distance comes to thousands of feet! It's the kind of job you just can't see the end of, so rather than a goal, it becomes a hobby. Hell, it's practically a lifestyle unto itself. I spend about an hour a day with a bucket, a rag, and a razor blade, ever-so-carefully cutting away the caulk. With no vision of completion, cleaning one pane at a time is a real stress reducer. But it's also just one of more than two hundred tasks on the list, each one taking roughly three times as long as one might reasonably guess.
I repeatedly hear people say that they can't imagine having a five-year plan. Neither can I, but for entirely different reasons; this project is now at three and a half years, and we're barely started. It doesn't even make sense with an outlook of less than a decade. Twenty years is more like it.
Don't ever use the word "just". Really. Whenever a project demands that you "just" do this or "just" do that, you know that you've found the really hard part. The hard part is invariably the part that you dismissed because it seemed so trivial at the time. Whenever you hear the word "just", replace it with "tediously", or "expensively", or "with heroic persistence", because that's what it's going to be like.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 04:48 pm (UTC)Rule #2: It's all small stuff!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 06:45 pm (UTC)However, not getting spun up is an important thing to learn, otherwise you go insane.
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Date: 2008-06-03 07:12 pm (UTC)I guess an argument could be made to sweat the small stuff while it still is small stuff :)
I first heard this quote relative to software development -- the realm of misplaced commas and semicolons :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 07:46 pm (UTC)I was actually about to write a whole post about how making something like this work is all about being in control of lots of details, and that there are so many ways to fuck up that you have to be constantly on guard. However, now that things are mostly done it's hard to turn that attitude off, so perhaps that's actually good advice now. ;-)
Software is funny in that the biggest debates always occur over the smallest things!