Hot! With an extra helping of HUMID!! It was still 81F when I went to bed, and that was the coolest it had been all day. It really saps my energy and pace of work. Today promises to be like yesterday, with MOAR!!
More heat, more work, more cowbell…
I did get a bunch of stuff done. I ran some new electric, and some new gas lines in the garage. I’m getting set up to have A/C in the summer and heat in the winter. This house really isn’t that big, for all that it has 4 bedrooms, and the garage is slated to become a party room. It will still have a bunch of stuff stored in it, but it also has the pool table, and I need to find somewhere to set up the dart board.
Of course some of that stored stuff will have to be obscured or hidden, like a safe and fire proof file cabinet… and I don’t really want all the buckets of bulk food readily visible either. The regular food is already in metal cabinets and the freezers are black, which makes a surprising difference- they don’t poke you in the eye and scream “freezers”.
Plenty of work to do today including a trip to town to buy pink insulation. And something to use as exhaust piping for the A/C units. And maybe a plumbing part or two.
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While I was cooling down yesterday I had an interesting thought. Interesting to me anyway. I’m getting close to 60 years old, and I’m still finding ways that I’ve been programmed, conditioned, TRAINED, that are entirely unconscious behaviors and beliefs. The one that struck me was about not eating after bedtime. The night before I was hungry so I got out of bed and had a snack. I did it a week or so ago too. I’m a grown man, kids of my own, always had food in the house, and it never occurred to me that if I was hungry in the night, I could just go eat.
It didn’t take much, some crackers and cheese, but eating in the middle of the night (even though I was awake reading) was not something I’d ever done before this month. I’d been conditioned that you ate at meals, or had a snack during the day, and you didn’t get out of bed to eat something. Once you were in bed, it was the end of the day and the time to eat was past. (You’ve already brushed your teeth! never mind that you can brush them again.)
I know there are other things, I can hear my dad’s voice in some of the stuff I say to my kids and my wife. I can feel his expression on my own face sometimes. I’m sure that some of the things, most of them probably, are fine and won’t bite me in the @ss if the world turns upside down, but I can’t help but wonder if there are others, and when I’ll notice them.
It’s a minor thing, but I felt like I woke up somehow. I had something similar with taking showers. I recently realized I can take a shower as many times a day as needed. Somehow, I had the idea that I really shouldn’t take more than one shower a day… unless I was really dirty. Even then, I probably wouldn’t take one the following morning. Showers somehow were ‘a big deal’. They aren’t. Take one, if you need another in half an hour because you cut your hair and feel prickly, take another… or if you cleaned up before dinner, but smelled like smoke later, you can take another…
Weird huh? We’re creatures of habit and conditioning. Take a minute to consider if the things you are doing by rote and habit are GOOD things, and if they meet your needs NOW. Maybe you’ll find something that needs changing.
And stack, because how else are you going to prep?
nick
added- maybe I should start a tag for (not so) deep thoughts…