Procrastination and "Honey, What Were You Thinking?"

So I have 30 pounds of tomatoes in the freezer waiting to be canned. Back in September, when I told myself I needed to have them all processed by a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, that seemed like an easy deadline to keep.

And now I'm up against it. So next week it is. Production happens around here sometimes only after procrastination has run its course. 

Tomatoes. Next week. Firm. You can't bump tasks into the future once the future arrives, which is always sooner than expected.

In other news, Big Ag promised a good friend that his daughter's boyfriend could park his 26-foot long RV on our land this weekend. The catch? We don't have land to park it on, nor an RV space...we live on a hill. Does the friend know this? I don't think so. So a 26-foot RV will be parked front and center in our driveway all weekend long, housing someone we don't even know -- a boyfriend of a friend's daughter. We don't even know his name.

These are the things which test a marriage, I'm tellin' ya. And that's all I'm saying about that.

Berries and Mastodons

This week I came down with a weird summer cold, which I caught from my other son when he came to visit last week.  Much more of a chest cold than a head cold, but the main symptom which laid me out for a couple of days was a total, aching fatigue -- the kind that puts you into bed for at least a day, and on the sofa for at least another one after that.

While I was convalescing, Big Ag took over all the crop watering and berry-picking, which proved an interesting test to our marriage.  For while I was grateful for all the help he provided (which he did in addition to his own farm chores) when he returned the first evening after berry- picking, I was mortified to find he'd picked at least a pound of unripe berries, which would now be useless for anything.

I wanted to shout at him and then just cry when I saw all those beautiful, unripe berries in that big basket.  But instead, I just quietly threw them in the compost when he wasn't looking and thanked him for standing out there and picking all my berries after an already long day of work. I didn't shout or cry, because it would have been unkind and undeserved.

In the end, the over-picking actually worked out well, since it gave me a couple of days to convalesce without having any berries ready to pick at all, since anything close to being ripe had already been picked off.  And by the time I went back down to our rows of olallieberries, raspberries and blackberries three days later, there was a decent enough harvest that the ones we threw out won't matter in the end.

But this does prove my theory once again that most men are well-suited for big picture, stalking-a-mastodon-off-in-the-distance kinds of tasks, and most women are better suited to fine detail work, such as berry-picking or something like embroidery.  I don't understand how he could not tell the difference between the ripe and unripe berries -- both by sight as well as by the feel of the berry itself when you grasp it between your thumb and forefinger. But then again, sometimes he doesn't understand why I can't visualize a big-picture plan he has as well as he can.

This is not an across-the-board assessment, of course.  There are some men quite gifted at fine-detail work, so please don't think my theory holds out in all instances.  I'm the first to tell you it doesn't.  But in general, I have found it to be true ... perhaps 75 percent of the time?

Now Big Ag has my cold and is simply working through it -- perhaps because his big-picture mind doesn't focus on the fine-detail aches and pains of his ailment as much as I did when I was sick, and he's therefore better suited to soldier on, despite his discomfort.

But it also proves out another theory -- that opposites attract for good reason.  And whether you're picking a life partner from the opposite sex or your own, finding someone with a different skill set than your own is wise for many, many reasons.  

Not the least of which are berry-picking and mastodon hunting.

That's how we roll

So Big Ag and I are walking through a nice property our real estate gal is showing us over at the coast.  As I walk through the house and garden, I notice the amount of light in the house, mentally try and fit our furniture into the space available, and see how much weeding and planting it will take to make the garden what I see it being.  I admire the expansive northern views, the rose garden and the chicken coop. Big Ag walks through and comments on the house's need for new carpet, new tile, the cruddy condition of the walls and the probability of rodents in the attic.


That's not a perfect generalization; there are times when he spots some amazing feature of a place that I've missed or I find something that is of genuine concern that he hasn't seen, but in general this is how we roll.  Sometimes his pessimism gets on my nerves, and I'm sure my proverbial, "I'm sure we could fix this!" approach drives him similarly nuts.


But here's the thing. We're different, but we do complement each other.  Between us, we've got all the bases covered.  If we were both nit-picky and negative, we'd never find a place we'd be willing to take a risk on and put our faith in.  If we were both Pollyannas, we'd most certainly end up in a place that would fall down around our heads within a year or two.


Sometimes I think about it in terms of past relationships.  I used to have a tendency to find "fixer" men, believing I could somehow make everything better.  Usually this ended badly for them and sadly for me, when I finally realized I should have taken off the rose colored glasses a looooong time before I finally did...like before I ever got involved.  Big Ag tended to find women he thought were in mint condition, only to discover there's really no such thing and that sometimes the flaws that lie beneath are the ones that cause a house -- or a person -- to ultimately fail.  


But I didn't meet Big Ag until I was 40, so at that point I had gotten over the urge to find someone who would be a "fixer" if they were a house, and I think when he married me, he deliberately married a real person with flaws, a true partner, and not an ideal.  And thank goodness we did.  Because between us, as different as we are, we actually do have all the angles covered to make our dream come true, even when it requires work and compromise.