A MONTH OFF

I was planning to take the last couple of months of the year off, 
or half-off, just not working on new products to sell. As usual it 
didn't quite work out because everything drags on too long, but I 
pretty much reached the point yesterday.

But then it's not quite time off because it's really time for doing 
all the non-profitable jobs I've been optimistically listing for 
completion on weekends. I've got to attempt bodywork on my car 
(inc. learning MIG welding), solar power for my house, paint all 
the wood on the house where the old paint has flaked off, finish 
that backup gravity-fed water supply and satellite dish 4G antenna 
platform (the modem's signal has been dropping out from time to 
time since the 3G turn-off, though not too bad yet), and the 
eternal job of trying to make the rusty guttering on the house and 
shed work. Oh and fix the potholes in the (long) driveway _again_, 
fix the shed where my parts car lives, get rid of the bees that are 
spreading through the roof of my house again, and the ones in my 
parts car now. Fix the instrument panel in the ute again because my 
last effort failed - the intermittent short must be in the fuse box 
itself. etc. etc.

Then there are all my hobby projects, mostly with electronics and 
computers. I think I could work myself up to feeling enthusiastic 
about resuming some of my electronics tinkerings again, but then 
the computer jobs solve actual problems for me. Rationally I should 
pick them up, but I can't seem to get into them lately. It's 
probably because there's one project that's reached the point of 
"oh, I didn't realise this would need to be this complicated" and 
although I feel I should finish it before I forget everything, I 
really fear the always-hated debugging stage where it's just going 
to be tedious as hell. In principle it's not that hard, but it's 
web-based and just the grind of putting together all the index 
pages is wearing.

I guess it's just another one of my days of apathy. I'm also sort 
of annoyed with myself for making a mess of replacing the sway bar 
links on the Jag over the last couple of days. Just four bolts, yet 
I get the nyloc nut size wrong (assumed metric but it was imperial) 
and wrecked the thread on a bolt. New bolt and nylocs worked the 
next day, but I also tried out a cordless impact driver that I 
bought from a market with a broken battery for $1. I opened up the 
NiCd battery pack and tracked down a new replacement assembly of 
NiCd cells in the same configuration on Aliexpress for ~$30. Got 
that and soldered them to the contacts in the old battery pack, and 
was all proud of myself. Except my thinking was that it would help 
undo stuck nuts/bolts. Tried it on these nuts, already fairly 
easily undone with a regular socket handle, and it wouldn't shift 
them. So that's useless. Except at least it does make quick work of 
screwing the wheel nuts on before torquing them up. Then at the end 
I was checking over the suspension and clattered my head into 
something which chipped one of my front teeth, so that's been 
uncomfortable since. That might not have happened if I'd finished 
building my raised vehicle inspection/mouse-proof-parking platform 
- another job to do.

Also I built my bath-tub / satellite dish stand assembly with pipes 
for the tractor forks to slide into so it could be lifted on top of 
the tank stand behind the house. In my typical way I obsessively 
measured the fork diameter and picked out some pipes laying around 
the farm, then evidently went back and grabbed the wrong ones to 
use, which where too narrow, so the forks only fit about half way 
on, which makes things very precarious. They were a lot of work to 
mount securely in the frame too, so I'm committed to using them.

These things just piss me off. I want something to just go smoothly 
for once, but I'm just not the person for it. I can obsess over 
double checking things, and do, but that just makes everything take 
ages and then very often my mistakes tend to be things I got right 
initially but I confused myself when double-checking them. I'm just 
not capable of true consistency. I only eat one of three simple 
meals for dinner each night and I even manage to stuff up cooking 
those every so often. It just makes me wonder why I bother trying.

So this is another one of my posts that's degenerated into a 
whinge, but I feel better for writing it anyway. I do now have a 
reprieve in the form of a holiday planned for this time next week. 
Not ideal circumstances because it's for the funeral of one of my 
uncles, first member of my preceeding generation to kick the 
bucket. It's a decent drive away, so I decided to stay for a couple 
of nights and make it a short holiday. Now my mother is suggesting 
we stay together at a rental house/cabin. She's offered to pay, and 
deserves the company, but will this actually be a return to the 
strained childhood family holidays with my mother and stepfather 
that put me off the whole idea of holidays entirely until last 
year? At least now I do have my own car to escape in, which counts 
for a lot, and a separate bedroom. Wandering aimlessly around 
caravan parks never quite cut it as a substitute for having my own 
space.

 - The Free Thinker.