I had two little chores I wanted to knock out this morning. Tobie and I would be out anyway because I had to go to S&L’s to feed their chickens and cat so I threw some things in the back of the Jeep…
…and drove out to Ian’s rifle range.
Ian’s range consists of two racks I made from an old oil tank stand back in ’18. Longtime readers will remember I was very pleased with myself back then. There’s been some tweaking on it since then but the two racks are still there even though they don’t get much use these days. Ian stopped coming up so often, then stopped coming up at all, and for the past several months I haven’t been shooting anything but pistols and I have my own range for that. Problem is that talus behind the plate rack consists of volcanic ash which makes the worst mud I ever saw and flows like syrup when wet. So every now and then I have to go there with a shovel and dig out the bottom plates.
Doesn’t take very long.
Then there’s this one big bush that’s been in the way of the driveway to Ian’s Cave ever since the big washout a few years ago that cost him 10 or 15 feet of front yard to the wash that runs in front of the cave. There’s not quite enough room for the Jeep and the bush but I’ve been forbidden to remove the bush. So I just trim it every now and then.
And that’s when the morning gradually started to go to hell on me. I noted that the chainsaw’s battery was nearly flat. No problem. I came home and went to where I thought I’d left the charger, and it wasn’t there. I looked in the second place I thought it would be and it didn’t seem to be there either but in truth the shelf in my powershed was such an unholy mess I could have been wrong about that.
A little backstory…
My powershed is – not my proudest achievement.
In my defense it was a falling-down shed that somebody else paid me to remove, being unspecific as to what I did with the parts. This was in 2012, just when I was needing a shed for my own inverter, batteries and charge controller so I knocked it down and inexpertly but quickly put it back together where it is now. And I’ve sort of lived with it ever since. There’s room for my tools and fasteners and such – and roughly half the rats in Eastern Arizona. There’s one shelf that’s always a real embarrassment. In April my older brothers came to visit and I wanted to show them how my power system had evolved – but I really didn’t want them to see the inside of that shed. So it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that the chainsaw’s charger was on that shelf somewhere but just buried in debris since I hadn’t used it in almost a year.
I ended up cleaning up the shelf, hauling a bunch of stuff out of the shed, and sweeping up a few cubic feet of rat shit and nesting material which took over an hour…
…and never did find the charger I was looking for. Then, in despair, I happened to look to my right and there it was, safely and neatly on the wall where I’d hung it from a nail to keep it out of the debris.
Very slightly covered by some wires and ropes.
Oh, well. The shelf needed cleaning. And a bunch of stuff that no longer needed storing will be going to the dump in a week or two, so the timing wasn’t bad.
I just bought a 56-volt Ego weed-eater–OK, OK, damn it, ‘string trimmer’–and I’ve been impressed by its power output. I had a 40-volt Worx which failed to amaze, but the new Ego is miles better.
At least you did not succumb to my bugbear temptation…..buy a new one, use it, and then store in on the shelf next to…..the other two items of that kind I already own but couldn’t find.
As I age, my eyes aren’t any worse than normal for my age, but the connection between my eyes and my brain isn’t what it once was. And that really shows up when I’m trying to find a specific object in visual clutter. So I have difficulty in exactly the situation you describe. I just need to repeat a search two or three times before giving up.
So far anyhow, aging beats the alternative.
I have found that if I look for a thing, I will look right at it (MULTIPLE times) and not see it. So, the strategy is to repeat the search, only look for something else. Lo, you will stumble over the other thing you were looking for.
It’s like the picture in your head of what you want to find acts like an anti-filter, blocking rather than lighting up what you’re trying to find. Or maybe it’s too specific and rejects anything that isn’t precisely what the image is. Example: you won’t find the red spatula because it’s actually green.
No, but I did consider it. 😀
One of the joys of old age, how we can remember the lyrics from a song that played back in the sixties or seventies but can’t remember where we put a tool down twenty minutes ago. 😊
My problem seems to be when I clean a bench or table I find a tool that needs fixing, then I stop cleaning and fix it, then find anther 1/2 finished project then go after that, then it may be a week before the table gets cleaned. But on the plus side I have fixed several tools or things and that is always productive too.