February Doldrums

This has been a strange winter.  We saw the sun yesterday for the first time in over a week and today was another gray blanketed sky and damp  chilly temperatures.  No sunshine in the forecast until the end of the week.  I may wither on the vine by then.  Though shorter by several days than most months, February always seems to drag.

When the weather is like this, I just can't seem to get motivated.  All week while I'm at work and especially on the long drive to and from work, I think about all the things I want/need to accomplish in the coming weekend.  The list is usually longer than I can handle in the two-day weekend, but I do my best.  Prepping is a labor-intensive lifestyle and working full time away from home limits how much time there is to devote to it. 

I intended to make soap this weekend.  I have all of the ingredients.  I just need to do it.  It would probably only take me about two hours including grating the bar of Zote if I would just get motivated and do it.  Not this weekend, it didn't happen. 

I intended to do some clean-up outside this weekend.  Lots of leaves to be raked, beds to be cleaned out and a few weeds to be pulled.  Now is a good time to rake leaves because they're damp from all the rain we've had earlier in the week and will clump together.  But I made one excuse after another to myself and never got outside on Saturday.  The big clean-up just didn't happen. 

I intended to sweep out the garage this weekend.  It's a three bay garage, separate from the house and in desperate need of a good sweeping and some organizing.  One of the bays holds my radial arm saw, a long workbench and the feed barrels for the horses.  We are in that bay every day, usually twice a day, so it's not too bad.  But the middle bay is where we store small square bales of hay.  We usually buy 75 at a time and they are stacked six feet high.  Yeoldfurt wrestles one out to the horses when we are in between round bales and it's too wet to move a round bale.  It's been too wet for over a week now and next week doesn't look good either.  Bales of hay are messy when you move them ...bits and pieces of hay everywhere.  The hay gets dusty once it's on the floor and getting walked on, but it's dry and not moldy ...I had intended to gather a bunch of it up and carry it down to the chicken's nesting boxes.  They have some hay in their boxes, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind some extra, especially with the cool wet weather we've been having.  The third bay of the garage is in the worst shape.  It's where we store the saddles on various stands and racks but it's also where everything else that needs shelter but doesn't belong in the house tends to land.  There are carts and boxes and hand tools and weedeaters and various cords and ropes ...all strewn about in no real organized fashion.  Sunshine was predicted for both Saturday and Sunday this weekend.  I wanted to drag everything out of that third bay and clean it up and put it back in some kind of order.  Sigh ...it didn't happen.  Saturday was sunny and I blew off my plans for the garage because I thought I would have nice weather Sunday too.  When Sunday dawned gray and cold and miserable, any ambition I had left for the garage vanished. 

Now I'm having trouble sleeping ...can't quit thinking about all the things I didn't get accomplished this weekend.  I'll probably have trouble staying awake tomorrow.