Beyond full-time work and perhaps beyond help

Old dog, new tricks?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  That’s an old adage.  When one has moved on from full-time work, there should be more time.  The pace should slow and in theory, one should be less prone to mistakes and mis-steps.  However, there is a chance that you might now be so excited about doing all the things there wasn’t time for before that you still operate on minimal looking before leaping.  It could be this has nothing to do with more or less daily paid work and a whole lot about one’s innate character.  I have always gone for quantity over quality when doing things.  Give me many experiences over few any day of the week.  It frustrated my mother to no end.  My dear patient mother, who loved and cared for us. She also knew us and with me, she would often say I did things too quickly and didn’t take enough time to do things really well.  As a teenager there were other things she noted too.  One day she was totally exasperated with me-I think it was something related to lack of initiative.  She let me have it with the most forceful of statements and a dire warning “Barb!” she said, “You are going to grow up to be nothing but a lazy twerp!”  Yikes, I thought, that doesn’t sound great.

When it comes to getting stuff done, I am of the school that says-if a man on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice it, then it’s good enough.  Perfection is over rated.  It can stifle you, immobilize you and while you are trying to do one thing perfectly, there are two other things you will never get around to.

And so I got lost

The above is the build up to rationalize how I got lost trying to find a golf course recently. It’s a course that is, in theory, about 30 minutes from our home.  The golf league gave out detailed instructions on how to get there on the website.   Why would I write down the detailed instructions when I had a pretty good idea where I was going.  I looked at the instructions on-line (likely while I was baking muffins and thinking about the garden and reading the newspaper), had a look at what’s what on Google Maps (while I was searching for the stain for the garden furniture and practising my blessed swing tip from the recent golf lesson and packing the car to go golfing).  Now, in my defense, I wrote down on paper the number of the highway exit and I stuffed it in my pocket.  To make a long story short, I don’t know where I got the exit number from but it was 3 exits too soon.  I’m thinking instead of the exit number, I wrote down the paint number of the stain for the garden furniture.  Who knows.   I was lost.  The map in the car didn’t cover the area and every other aid I had just was not helpful when I was getting later and later.

Get me to the golf course on time or maybe not

In the end I was late for my golf tee time.  This is not looked upon favourably in the golf world.  Thankfully, the course and the league accommodated me.  It was a glorious day to golf and I met some new people.

To sum it up, being beyond work, does not mean you are beyond your usual pattern of behaviour.  Ah, well, what’s the big deal.  A lot of this could be avoided if one of my wonderful colleagues from work had come home with me and lent her immeasurable organizational abilities to my next chapter.  She declined and I am where I am.  If my mom was still here I would like to tell her I didn’t grow up to be a lazy twerp and I still do many things without regard to achieving the highest of standards.   Now I am going to stain that furniture, pot those plants, take that bike ride, read that book and go golfing later today.  I’ll look up the directions to the golf course…really  I will.