"Ex-Xmas Tree" by Richard F. Yates

Busy, busy, busy... And yet I still find time to give myself ridiculously pointless tasks that seem simple, but that always end up taking forever.

Yesterday, I finished a new painting (more on that in the next post), walked down the street to my older daughter's house for a few minutes (her new baby is due to arrive any minute now), revised my "Almost Seven Thousand Words About a Stack of Movies" post (thanks to @bryan-imhoff for catching that I missed writing a review for one of the movies in the stack), took out the garbage, showered, shaved (fancy!!!), cut my fingernails....and all of this on four hours sleep...

PLUS!!!! I also finally put my hands on a project that's been waiting for six months for me to complete it... I finally dealt with our Christmas tree!

Here is a "Before" image:

My plan (which I assumed was only going to take a few minutes) was to saw this sucker up to use as fuel for our backyard fire pit. (Turns out I misjudged my time-frame by several hours.)

It wasn't a big tree, and it's been sitting half-under our carport next to the garage since a couple days after Christmas, so I assumed it would be nice and dried out by now. To my chagrin, it was still VERY sappy. (You wouldn't guess to just look at me, but I HATE getting my hands dirty! I think the beard makes me look more like a logger or hillbilly than I really am...) My hands were sticky and gross after just a few seconds of sawing and pruning, but I tried to suck it up and push on through the project.

Here's the "After" photo:

I was pretty surprised, considering how long it took me to cut this thing up, how little fire wood I actually got for me efforts...

Some jobs maybe aren't worth the time and energy it takes do them. Maybe. But I learned a lesson, and I got out of the house---and out of my "clean hands" comfort zone---for a while...and we have about ten minutes worth of fire wood to burn at tonight's "Fathers' Day" barbecue, so it wasn't a total waste of time! (Hurray?)

In other news, I sold another piece of cryptoart, which is pretty cool (for me, at least.) Thanks to @joechiappetta for taking an interest!!! And, I highly recommend checking out Mr. Chiappetta's offerings at MakersPlace! His stuff is very fun!!! Go HERE to see what he's been making lately! You won't regret it!

Here is the image that Mr. C bought:

Okay folks, that's enough from me for now. Happy Dads' Day! And keep on rockin'!!!

---Richard F. Yates (Holy Fool)

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