Tuesday, June 2

Today I am grateful for:

Nice warm weather.

A good lesson on River. I also got to see one of my friends riding their new horse. This is a woman who decided to sell her steady old horse to a (hopefully forever) home where he's just going to be ridden by some kids out in the pasture. She's tentatively riding (if it doesn't work out, she'll try again) a pretty quiet mare who is already super well-trained in dressage, and if anything, is almost a little too well trained (my friend needs to be just as good at controlling her body as this horse is). It was interesting to watch.

That my sweetie is finally listening to me a bit, and trying to be creative in finding pockets of time to make progress on the house. I made a window of time for him before he went to work today (by just sort of making him sit down and do it, really. I told him that if he managed his time, he could have a couple of completely uninterrupted hours to research, if he'd just focus on that one thing before going to work) to research the software he needs to do a digital drawing of the addition that the bank wants. If the bank is satisfied, they'll extend our mortgage so we can get the funds to keep going with the house.

He's been talking about needing to do this for three months, and for some reason or another has not found the time in those three months to actually do the work on this, even though it is absolutely crucial for us to move ahead. He's had about five hours a night on his days off to screw around playing video games, but not research software critical to getting the money to work on the house this summer.

I'm trying to get him to commit to ordering the windows for the basement, because he says we can do those whether or not we get the mortgage extension. It will take the company about four weeks to make them, and I allow a week or two on each side what with him dithering and then getting them home, and that puts us into July. He says they are "so easy to install it won't take any time at all, so I don't know why you're in a hurry". My view, is that if we have them, and they're so damn easy to install, that we can aim on doing one a day in the couple of hours before he goes to work, and be focused about accomplishing something.

I am trying to be proactive, and problem-solving about this. I need to feel like we have a plan. My sweetie's plans are all vague, and have no timelines, and no urgency. I already know why; we can live in the house the way it is right now, and every time we reach a certain kind of baseline functionality on something, the work stops. This is how it is with every smaller project. If we can live in it, then we don't need to finish the door frame, or fix the cracks in the walls, or the trim.

Every time I ask him when something is going to be done, he says "we don't need to do this until the end of summer, because this is a quick thing". He's said this about the addition, getting the dirt removed, getting the concrete removed, getting the addition built, and installing windows. Apparently all of these things are super simple quick things that we don't have to worry about until the end of summer. Does he even realize that if we just fuck around until August, that it only leaves about 20 days that he is home to get all of that done?

We need to have each set of days off mapped out, with a plan, and the materials and machines in place so that we can do a block of work. Not just not get anything done on his first day home, spend a day buying stuff, going back to town the next day for the stuff he forgot, sleeping most of the next day and getting a bit of a start on something, then really working for one day until we run out of something and quit, and then going to town again because he wants fresh food for lunches. This cannot be our schedule.

Today I mowed the lawn again, because spring means fast growth. I'm glad we have a good ride on mower.

Some nice time with Dandy, just scratching him in his favorite spots.