Before It's Too Late

There are few things in life which bring people as much internal shame as their personal 'to-do' list. Having a long 'to-do' list of home tasks is a little like having homework, only there is no teacher waiting for you to turn it in and the only person who will grade how quickly you complete these tasks is yourself. Since humans tend to be much tougher on themselves than strangers, a lot of people see a long list of tasks they have yet to complete as a sign they are slacking. I think the real problem is that the list never stops growing so you never actually make up any ground. I know that for me it seems like every day something catches my eye and I think to myself, "Oh, I should fix/replace that... tomorrow." But even as I am thinking that deep down I know that tomorrow will come and go without that task being accomplished. The problem is that I apparently have no short-term memory when it comes to these projects and, because I don't have a physical list where I keep track of all the things to be done around the house, they get replaces by more pressing matters. However, the worst situations are the ones where I vow to repair something and then completely forget about it until the next time that situation comes up, only to discover by that point it is too late to get to it.

The last few days have been what I like to call 'stupid hot'. I know it is supposed to get warm in the summer, but I think even the hot months should have a limit. Today it was almost 100 degrees in the greater Boston area, which is a ridiculous number. As you can imagine, I have been hiding in air conditioning as much as possible and only venturing outside if no other alternative can be found. (Here's how hot it has been - I was outside earlier this evening and thinking to myself how much more pleasant it was than this morning. I told myself the temperature had to have dropped 10-15 degrees. I checked the thermometer, which revealed that it was 90 degrees outside. When 90 degrees feels refreshing, it has been too damn hot.) It is the kind of hot where you can feel heat seeping in even through closed windows. In my case that means I can also feel heat coming in through the ceiling because my house has one of those pull-down ladders to get up to the attic. The ladder sits on a piece of wood which doesn't perfectly fit the entrance and the heat comes in through every crevice. The gap around the opening may be small, but when it is this hot that entrance is big enough to let me know it is there. You can tell the days when it is really bad because even in a fully air-conditioned house as you walk by you feel the hot air hit you in the face. It's like standing in cold ocean water and suddenly your legs get hit by a random warm patch of water - there is pretty much no circumstance under which that can be a good thing.

The annoying part is that they make covers for these kinds of pull-down ladders which are meant specifically to seal the entrance and keep air in or out, depending on what you want to accomplish. So, I could have bought one of these covers months ago and been done with it. However, I convinced myself they wouldn't fit right and instead got the materials to build a custom-sized weather-proof cover. That would be fine except buying the material is step 1 of a roughly 5-step process and I stopped after that first step. I know I should really take care of this, if for no other reason than to cut down on wasted cold air but I never remember to get around to it and the point when it finally comes back to me is when I am walking under the hatch and it feels like someone is blowing their breath in my face. Let me tell you, July is a really bad time to remember you have a task which requires you to go up into an attic. At that point you should just forget about whatever it was or go buy a new one, because the general rule of thumb when it comes to find out how toasty it is in your typical attic during the summer months it to take whatever temperature it is outside, multiply it by a factor of 1,000 and that should give you a pretty good idea of hot it is up there. In other words, I'm certainly not about to begin construction on this cover now.

What's weird is that normally I am very organized about this kind of stuff, which is only serving to make this situation all the more frustrating. In the short term this leaves me with two options: hoping the heat breaks, then crossing my fingers the rest of the summer isn't as hot and I get the cover built in the fall, or sucking it up and building the cover now while sweating enough to fill a fish tank. Honestly, neither one of those sounds very appealing (or likely to happen). Instead, I think the long-term answer to my problem is to break down and admit that I actually need to start keeping a physical list of all the things I want to fix, replace, paint, move or buy. That may be the only way I know to sit down and prioritize the projects, because if this heatwave reminded me of anything it is that sometimes knowing when do to something is just as important as knowing how to do it. The good news is that whenever I eventually do remember to get around to making this cover I've already got the materials, which means step 1 is done. Apparently I just need to write down the rest of the steps and I'll be done in no time.