Tuesday, February 19, 2008

I'm Slow, But I Get There Eventually...

I hope that being persistent is a worthy compensation for being slow. Normally I have a number of projects that I work on, and when I hit a wall on one, I leave it for a while to marinate while I work on something else, meanwhile pondering the problem with the first thing. Right now is no exception. For weeks I have been pondering the re-assembly of our bathroom sinks after having our counters replaced. It should never have taken so long. A plumber could do each in 15 minutes or less, I'm sure, but I got puzzled by some metal parts I got for the drain, thinking they might work better than the plastic ones we had before. I kept thinking that the flange was supposed to tighten better than I could make it do to the lower part that pokes up through the hole of the sink to connect with it. It remained loose and I thought the plumber's putty was causing the slippage; it is slippery stuff. It took me so much of this time to go back and try again and again, only then to find that there's a big nut (a metal one, not the human one) on the underside of the sink that I can tighten and the whole thing is solved. Now I just need to assemble them--which took a couple of trips to the hardware store because now I have another inch that the drain has to reach, so an extension is in order.
Meanwhile, I'm working on our taxes. I've never deducted college expenses before and there are at least three ways to do it. Katie wants this expedited so we can complete her Fafsa--but life goes on and I have to ponder it while I do other things. It percolates in my head while I work on the drains, and while I do the dishes, and while I make dinner...but that's how I work. There are always plenty of projects that I can re-try while the others wait.
My mom used to complain that I never finish anything. I think if she'd only waited a few more years, some of my projects would have been done and she could have found I wasn't so bad after all. I have finished cooking a huge number of meals since then, for example. And thankfully, those didn't take weeks for me to figure out.

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