One of my COVID projects when we were all sheltering in place was placing red retaining wall blocks to form a stair step above the gazebo. I got into the rhythm of laying the decorative blocks and continued the line past the steps to delineate a flower bed. At a certain point the flower bed continues, but I stopped laying the blocks. The picture below indicates how unsightly this is. I just lost momentum. The chairman of the board tells me that I could probably lay the remaining 3 blocks in less than an hour, but in the last 2 years I have not been able to bring myself to restarting the job.
Momentum is a funny thing. In sports, it is often the difference between winning and loosing. In South Asia our gang played the ancient Viking game called Kubb (It is a lot of fun). At one point my team mate and I came close to victory, but we lost momentum and had to go through more tense rounds until momentum returned and pushed us to victory.
When we lived in the Republic of Congo there was no road to our region. Travel involved either a flight or a boat trip. Even with reservations sometimes government officials took our seats on the plane so we could not travel. Once Diane and the kids made the flight to Brazzaville, but there was no seat for me. I used the time alone in Impfondo to do something for the family. Our water came from the rain that we directed into a cistern and pumped to a water tower. It was hot when the sun was out, but cooled off quickly in the evening. I was excited about surprising everyone with a solar hot water heater. What I made was beautiful. A black 5 gallon container insulated and surrounded by a sheet metal housing with glass panes on top. I got a flight out the next day. Our beautiful solar hot water heater was in the shed when we got back from Brazzaville and remained there, unattached to the water pipes, for the next 11 years.
When I was growing up, I learned something about momentum. In the winter of our first year in New Hampshire the whole family browsed through a bunch of seed company catalogs. We had long discussions about which kind of fruit trees we would plant. That momentum waned and we planted no fruit trees. After that lesson, when we settled in TN, we made a point of planting fruit trees our first spring in the house.
I have learned to ride a wave of momentum as far as possible. The time to paint or hang pictures is the first week after you move into a house or apartment. For this blog post I planned on researching more ways to carry projects on to completion without stalling, but I just ran out of momentum.
Adventures in Suburbia 