“Remoted” – Day 89 (Saturday)

During a conversation this morning with a friend, we talked about house projects (roofs, fencing, deck rails, oh my!), growing to-do lists, and shedding extra stuff (among other things). We talked about the most useful tidbit about project queues from my Production Operations Management class way back when, which is to do the quick jobs first to get them out of the queue, and how sometimes completing one task provides momentum for a series of tasks (that whole bodies in motion thing).

Eggplant casserole!

When I got off the phone, inspired by our conversation, I decided to wash the bathroom floor, a generally quick task that had been put off for a week (ok, it was way longer). It’s a small floor which doesn’t take long to do by hand. The completion of that first task inspired a further step – cleaning the tile grout with a toothbrush and a paste of baking soda peroxide. The completion of the floor led to washing the frying pan and plastic containers in the sink, which led to scrubbing the sink and cleaning the counters. Lunchtime was approaching, so a casserole was assembled with sliced tomato, sauce, and mozzarella cheese layered with breaded eggplant from the freezer (which looked a lot like cookies through the plastic container  and faked me out/disappointed me for weeks as I rifled through the freezer). 

Soul crushing failure.

Propelled by forward motion, preparation of the future flower bed continued with weeding and the addition of a bag of planting soil and shopping online for flower bed fencing. That’s pretty much where progress ground to a halt and it wasn’t solely because I was sucked into multiple consecutive soul crushing losing rounds of Candy Crush and binge watching all seasons of Schitt’s Creek for the third time. 

The flower bed fencing choices seem to be limited now that I need more of it. The criteria include being inexpensive and tall enough to keep the dogs out of the planting area, which rules out a lot of the edging solutions. If only I had ordered more than one roll of the wire fencing a few months ago when I bought what I needed at the time. Drat. Who knew I would decide to install another flower bed? In my imagination, there would be a flower bed edged with concrete breeze block, but, even though Facebook groups are full of photos of the stuff, it seems to be impossible to find in real life. Perhaps it would be more realistic to aim for one edged in wine bottles, which is a material that is easily sourced, starting immediately from my own recycle bin.