Tying Up A Loose End

So I'm finally going to write about that accomplishment I hinted at here, even though from my nit-picky view it is not 100% finished yet. With school starting for all three boys next Tuesday, I concede that any finishing touches that get put on this project will not be occurring any time soon. (And as for the start of school, despite my best efforts over the last couple of weeks to get us on a better schedule, as of Friday morning at 8 a.m., two boys were hunched over the computer, awake but still in pajamas, I was in my nightgown trying to jump-start my brain with a cup of coffee, and our soon-to-be kindergartener sprawled in bed, snoring. We've never been late to the first day of school, but we've occasionally been on time calmly and in style, rather than rushing onto campus at the last moment in a panic. Looks like this is not going to be one of the "in-style" years.)

Anyway, here is the project that I finished during the two weeks the boys were in camp, to the detriment of my project to rid my house and garage of junk, but of immeasurable benefit to my mental health:

This is a picture of the side of my house, and the project I completed was to lay down those square pavers and gravel from the edge of the concrete (just visible at the end, past the bins) all the way to my back yard, to cover the packed dirt that was all that was there before. Dry and dusty in the summer, muddy and slippery in the winter, and ugly all year 'round, that walkway on the west side of our house that almost never gets sun and certainly doesn't get enough water to allow grass to grow has bugged me since we moved in in 2001.

Of course, it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do to create a path instead of dirt. The easiest thing would have been to throw down gravel, except that I needed to be able to roll our green bin for yard waste to the back yard. A gravel path seemed less than ideal for that. Not to mention, since Son #1 and Son #2 were rather young at that time, the thought of giving them a vast field of ammunition to throw at one another seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. (Son #2 was also a put-everything-in-your-mouth kind of baby/toddler, and while I don't gross out easily, the thought of fishing gravel out of his mouth on a regular basis did not appeal.)

Thoughts of what to do to improve this area got put on the back burner for many years, while I took up sporadic freelance proofreading/copyediting, volunteered at the boys' elementary school to the point of indentured servitude, had Son #3, and continued all of the above plus enrolling Son #3 in a co-op nursery school. With that to-do list, along with the general work involved in supporting the boys' education and trying to make sure they didn't blindside me with forgotten project deadlines and 9 p.m. requests for two dozen cupcakes to be delivered to school the following day, home-improvement projects were a lost cause.

Last year I finally came up with an idea that included all the necessary components: functional path for rolling a yard waste bin, reasonably priced construction materials all available from a nearby store, and a method I could actually do myself. The only tough part required me digging down far enough into the hard-packed soil to put the pavers at a level with the small portion of concrete just behind the gate to the front yard.

I attacked the project with enthusiasm the week before we headed to Minnesota that summer, which turned out to be ill-timed, to say the least. I finished off the first three rows of pavers, admired my work, started the digging for the next couple of rows, left on vacation, and flew back home into a storm of PTA and booster club emails that immediately sapped my energy and attention for the next, oh, ten months or so. And my project languished, adding to my guilt-load for things undone. (As an added bonus, we have a gardener who comes to mow our lawn and tend to our yard once a week, as do most folks in Southern California. So I had the added satisfaction of knowing that our gardener was well aware of my failure to complete this project as he wrestled our green bin over the uncompleted excavation every single week. Sigh.)

I hadn't exactly intended to dedicate the two weeks the boys were in camp to finishing this path, but once I got started, I found it hard to stop. For one thing, I borrowed a small pick mattock from my dad this year for breaking up the rock-hard compacted dirt, instead of using a hoe like I did last year. This tool was infinitely better for the task, and after many hours of swinging it, I can say this definitely makes the short list for my weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse.

I also made a move I didn't realize was smart until several days into the task. I left my iPhone inside. Instead, I took the home phone (since I didn't want to be completely out of touch if the summer camp called to tell me one of the boys got hit in the head with a rock or something). No dings when emails came in. No melodious alerts when it was my turn in Words with Friends. Just me, my tools, and insanely hot L.A. weather. And a silent phone. It's amazing what you can accomplish when your attention isn't divided up into five-minute segments.

The one advantage to my delay of a year in completing the path was that I got to see that my plan (dig out the dirt, then tamp down a flat surface, cover with a underlaying polypropylene cloth to keep the gravel from gradually working down into the dirt, then lay down the stones and fill in the gaps with pea gravel) actually held up perfectly over the course of a year. One disadvantage was that I was so eager to jump in again to erase the shame of a year of delay that I started swinging the pick-mattock about an hour before it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to put on a pair of work gloves. The result? A large popped blister at the top of my palm where Band-Aids do not like to stay put, and a futile attempt over the days that followed to keep said blister clean and covered. Oh well. It did eventually heal.

As the path progressed I dug up enough rusty nails to give the entire neighborhood tetanus, many pieces of broken Mexican pavers (leftover from when the patio was finished, I'm guessing two homeowners ago), several bits of bathroom tile, and a toy plastic spoon, a little bit of suburban archaeology that gave a little bit of interest to an essentially boring task. I plotted out the path of the pavers around the drains to our sump system and the roots to the established vines that help to cover some of the cinder-block wall that encloses our back yard. I made multiple trips to the home improvement store to buy loads of pavers and gravel, enduring a bit of "hey-little-lady"ing as it became clear to the male employee loading my car that I wasn't simply taking these materials home for a hired helper or my husband to do the actual work. (I love my husband, but when he so much as picks up a drill driver I have to suppress the urge to pick up the phone in case a call to 9-1-1 is imminently needed. Mechanical ability and gender do not necessarily go hand in hand.) And I had to limit myself to a couple of hours of work a day, because the more I accomplished, the greater my drive to finish. However, there is only so much physical labor an essentially out-of-shape skinny forty-year-old can do in a day without making it impossible for herself to lift her arms the next day. So I played it smart.

But this year I finished the path, several days before our annual trip to Minnesota. (I haven't figured out how long it is exactly, but each of those pavers is just under one foot square, if you're curious.) Of course, the satisfaction of essentially completing it didn't last long--after all, I have a garage full of stuff to empty, closets to sort, bookshelves to purge, kitchen cabinets to clean. Realistically, one item off the to-do list (even a big one) doesn't amount to much. But as a N.Y. friend of mine would say, it's not nothing...

Back to Square One

Well, as anyone who has bothered to look at my defunct blog over the last nine months can tell, my last post proved to be eerily prophetic. It didn't take long for me to get sucked into the whirlpool of school obligations, volunteer and otherwise, and for my project to rid my house of extraneous possessions to grind to a halt. So now I get the dubious pleasure of starting back at the beginning, armed this time with some knowledge of what does not work. Lessons learned include, but are not limited to:

• Expecting to carve out time for yourself when you are still doing all of the tasks that made it impossible to carve out time for yourself is just as insane as it sounds.
• One person cannot manage the belongings of four. (I give my husband credit for handling his own stuff, though after over a decade in the same house he still doesn't know where things go in the kitchen.)
• Waiting on people who are both able-bodied and younger than I am makes me cranky.

So what am I going to do differently this time? To go point by point:

Point One: I actually am starting this summer a couple of obligations lighter. Son #3 graduated from his co-op nursery school on June 22nd, and I handed over the treasurer's notebook and responsibilities to my successor around the same time. On top of that, no more co-op means no more work days, so instead of spending my Monday mornings wrangling preschoolers and praying for not-rainy, not-windy, not-too-hot-not-too-cold weather at our outdoor school, I could conceivably go get a mani-pedi every week if I wanted to. Ha. I'm not kidding anybody. I'm far too cheap to spend my money on that. But you get the point. And as of mid-August, son #3 will be in school five days a week, six and a half hours a day, just like his brothers. I think going from his twelve-hour-a-week preschool schedule to over thirty hours a week in school is going to be just as big a jump for me as it is for him.

The other major obligation I am handing over is the booster club presidency. Much to my surprise and delight, a volunteer stepped up in April, just as I was beginning to think I was going to have to leave my notebook on the magnet coordinator's desk and enter the witness protection program to get out of the job. (Never mind the fact that I've been saying for two years that I would do a two-year term--nobody was listening to me.) I'm beginning to suspect that my successor is going to be better than I was, and though I feel a slight twinge at the thought, I am resolutely letting it go. I can tell myself she is building on what I started and all my friends will back me up on that, no matter what they actually think.

Point Two: This is a stickier wicket, since I have three boys and the oldest one is twelve. They all suffer from the apparently y-chromosome-linked blindness that allows them to wade through piles of dirty clothes or discarded toys without ever noticing them. Nevertheless, as I worked on cleaning up Son #1's room yesterday I made him sit with me and help sort through the mountain of papers he had amassed on his desk over the school year. The boys are old enough to clear their own plates from the table, put their own clothes in the hamper, pick up their toys, and generally not act as if their parents are their servants. Which brings me to...

Point Three: My new favorite line is, "No, you can get you _______." As in:

Son #2 (sitting and watching a Pokemon video on the computer): Mom, can you get me some apple juice?
Me (washing dishes at the sink): No, you can get you some apple juice.

This usually results in a dramatic groan, but Son #2, whose hands are not on backwards, does then go get himself the aforementioned juice. One of my many failings as a parent (I'm sure the boys could give you a fuller list than I could) is that I do give in to the temptation to do things for my kids that they can do themselves simply because it is faster and easier to do it for them (though I am hardly the only parent to behave this way). In the long term, this does not help them one bit.

Following through on this step will be a win-win: my boys will learn both useful skills and manners (as well as losing the expectation that the world is going to act like their secretarial staff/pit crew), and I will end up with less to do.

I won't lie. It is a bit demoralizing to think that I ended up a year later with almost nothing to show for my ambitions to organize my house and my life and claim some time for my own needs. On the other hand, the last year was not a total waste of time; I did do some things I was proud of and I may write about them on this blog in the future. But failing once does not mean that I should quit trying. So here we go again...