August 5, 2012

The Grasshopper and the Musher

Summertime---it’s a bit like when I was a kid, summer vacation was too short.  Unlike when I was a kid, however, I never whine to the dogs about having nothing to do.  I take the much more adult approach of telling them my excuses for not getting as much done as I should. 

As I write this, my plan is to start training the dogs in about ten days.  I’ll be doing three training sessions a week for the first month and I expect to finish each of these in less than three hours---prep, running two teams, then putting everything away.  Late September that upper limit will move to four hours per workout.  Even after I start training, I’ll have some time to finish all the things I want to get done---one of the excuses I tell the dogs. 

Thankfully, even as an old man, my ability to gauge just how long I can put tasks on hold seems to be intact (see my blog: The Fine Art of Procrastination).  That means that I haven’t just been explaining my excuses to my pack, I’ve also completed a few tasks.  For example, I did finally get my tooth pulled.  Given that that’s literally been a pain for six years, that had hit the A list.  My new dog, Gaiya, has been rendered an it---she’s been spayed.  Happily, my fears that what I had believed to be a false heat was actually real or that Prudhoe had been loose a lot longer than I thought and had mated with her were not realized.  I’ve done some of the financial chores I want to----but some still linger in my mind, distinctly incomplete.  I have started soliciting agents for my book.  I did redo a major portion of my website----I still have to add pictures but all of the members of the Silly Lake Pack are now correctly listed.  So I am progressing, just not with the focused power of a desert flash flood. 

The task that most exemplifies my state is----wait for it---cleaning my house.  I had started doing a thorough spring cleaning with a hard deadline set by a visit from a friend.  She never showed up, though, thankfully, I had finished a good 80% of what I planned to do for her visit.  Subsequently, I finished the remainder, though at a variety of times.  The house was never completely “spring clean” at once.  Other possible visits have had me get close to everything being clean simultaneously, but still not quite.  I imagine I’ll give it one final go in the next few weeks---of course this is now fall cleaning rather than spring cleaning. 

In the book, “The Phantom Tollbooth,” Milo meets up with a person who claims to be a tall man, a short man, a fat man, and a thin man.  In fact, he is exactly normal and that makes him the world’s tallest short man, shortest tall man, fattest thin man, and thinnest fat man.  I guess that in the big scheme of things, I’m both the grasshopper and the ant----just a very grasshopper like ant or a very ant like grasshopper.  Screw it, I’m a musher.