Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   paint procrastination
Tuesday, October 6 2009
It was my second day of working remotely for those guys down in the city, and of course I'd yet to become one with the project. My usual working method is to slack and procrastinate and work only grudgingly until an internal clock tells me that I've run out of time and I have to either get serious and buckle down or else blow the deadline. The period of procrastination is a peculiar form of purgatory because I'm not really working, but I can't seriously engage in the things I'd rather be doing. So I end up piddling around with half-assed low-commitment tasks. (The greenhouse well excavation would be an ideal procrastination project if I hadn't managed to wean myself off of it.) With this latest job, my piddling distractions have to be even more piddling because of the short leash they're keeping me on, calling every three hours and asking questions.
But, as I said, I've yet to become one with this project. When I do become one with a project, it represents a fairly sharp crossing of a threshold. A critical mass of knowledge and involvement develops, firing up a in a different set of motivational circuits in my brain, tapping into a mental force even greater than the one that causes me to grimly fritter away precious time. At that point I become obsessed with the task I'm being paid to do and, from my perspective, it's almost as if the project is completing itself.
Today, though, I found myself listlessly looking at code, stitching together an anemic database schema, and taking numerous breaks to attend to the Purple Martin house that I'll be installing on the outhouse roof. That enormous birdhouse has been outside for the three years since Gretchen and I bought it from a farm down along Hurley Mountain Road, and it's been gradually deteriorating in the rain. Last evening and today I used a wire brush to strip off all the loose paint flakes and then busted out the clamps and glue to fix parts of the plywood that had sprung apart or otherwise delaminated. This was all in preparation for repainting all of the birdhouse's disklike layers, starting with white primer and ending with a thick coat of high-gloss.
Painting, it turns out, is a great method of procrastination. You paint, you dribble out some work while that coat dries, and then you paint some more.


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