I know how Adaptive Curmudgeon feels when he says:
Among my many first world problems was a window in my shop that had rotted away. Wind was whistling through the 1″+ gaps around what once was the edges. Last year I bought a cheap window to fit the rough opening, and then dropped the ball… for an entire year.
As long as you’re not dead you haven’t given up. Right?
Which is why I have coined the term and have a whole category, sparsely populated, called DeRooneyfication, which is:
Sometime when I was reading some of his columns some number of years ago, I related to one of Andy Rooney’s situations. He mentioned going into his basement workshop and finding a number of projects that had been off to the side for a number of years, including a chair that needed fixing and whatnot. Even though I was probably just the long side of thirty at the time, it resonated with me, since I’d been collecting projects and materials for projects since before I got married. Now that I’m just the short side of forty–and soon on its long side–I decided to start finishing some of those projects.
But not lots of projects, gentle reader, oh, no! As a matter of fact, the blocker project, another term I coined, about which I wrote in 2018, has not been completed (by me, he said to really underline the passive voice). Instead, it has been moved to the side table in my workshop area of the garage. By “workshop area,” I generally mean the place where things get dumped, so that the first and most difficult project of any energized period of doing on my part is cleaning up the area so I can do anything there. A project itself that I often start but seldom finish.
I did, however, complete a little project last weekend that I sort of feel proud of/sort of disappointed that it took me so long to actually do it.
A couple of years ago, whilst I was in my making-pancakes-on-Saturday phase, I broke the glass in one of the cabinet doors. We store the glass measuring cups on the top shelf, and as I got one out, the other started to fall. I closed the cabinet door to try to arrest its fall, but to no avail–my attempt not only resulted in a broken measuring cup, but also broke the cabinet door and got glass shards in the foam shelf liner, so I cleaned it all up and discarded the cloth liner. As the cabinet had glass in it, we put in something a little nicer than the stick-on vinyl liner. So I removed that liner with the new glistening shards, removed the broken glass from the cabinet door, and there it sat for a long time with no shelf liner and no glass.
Some time ago, I actually bought replacement foam liner to put in, but I had not taken the effort because I was busy doing something close to nothing, but different than the day before (actually, the foam liner is black and white, not raspberry, however).
Last week, I reached in to the back of the cabinet to get a large serving bowl that we do not frequently use, so I saw that the shelf was dusty. On Friday night, I dreamed of cleaning out the kitchen drawers, so I put a bit of effort into that and cleaning all the dishes on the shelves in the cabinet, and, well, to make a short story long, I replaced the foam liner.
I even measured the shape of the aperture in the cabinet door to see if I had a piece of glass on hand to replace it, but I do not. Which gave me a bit of a sense of déjà vu; I am pretty sure I measured it and my glass on hand before. I don’t have a piece to fit, so maybe next time I go to the hardware store, I will pick one up and cut it down to size. At which point, I very well might experience the second part of the déjà vu: Realizing how expensive that glass is, and how I don’t want to spend that much money on something I might well botch.
Perhaps I will cut down a piece of wood to fit and maybe put some woodburning on it or perhaps décolletage découpage (dammit, I am forever getting those two mixed up, which is why I am no longer allowed in the craft classes at the local Hobby Lobby).
But not today. And maybe not for years. The older I get, the longer my timelines for deRooneyfication become. Which is in the true Rooney spirit, I believe.
