Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”- Mark Twain.

So how was your Thanksgiving? Good I hope. Mine was…well…different, I guess. At least it’s the term I’ll choose that, to me, best describes my Thanksgiving weekend.


I am still adjusting to “sharing” our two married children with their in-law families. I am not being nasty here, just selfish. It’s okay to be selfish sometimes, isn’t it? Especially when you selfishly want to spend the special holiday time with your children and their children.

Anyway, due to sharing time we had to wait until Monday for our family Thanksgiving dinner so the rest of the weekend seemed pretty normal to me and that included too many items on the old To-Do list to get done inside and out before Old Man Winter makes his way here.

Now, I’m not sure how your home projects go but ours kind of follows a pattern that defies that fact that my wife and I have been together for thirty-three years and home owners for all but three or four of those years.

First off, you pick a project, or it’s chosen for you, and either way, you don’t really want to do it, so you find little things to do to put off the big thing you are supposed to do until there is just no way to get around doing it so then you give in and accept that the baseball playoffs will not be getting viewed today and if you want to watch the ‘Riders’ game on Monday you’ll have to get something done so you can say you did something so then you can take some time off.

You with me so far? So, then you get things lined up to put that door that you bought last spring into the pantry and of course you’ve got to make a couple of trips to the hardware store first to buy something that you already had, but couldn’t find, so now you’re getting a little testy about the whole thing, you know, missing the ball games and not finding the thingamajiggy and having to go uptown and everything, so now the project is becoming an even bigger pain in your derrière, so you think excessive swearing will help, but it doesn’t, but you think it does so you keep it up until YOU’VE become the derrière pain yourself and you’re told “don’t do it then if it’s going to be that bad”, “No, no, honey, it’ll be fine, it’s just…you know…getting started…mumble, mumble…” head hanging.

Sound familiar? No? Lucky you! Anyway…you get started and get to the point where there’s no turning back so now you have to make the best of it because, in the end, you know HOW to do it you just don’t WANT to do it and then there’s a little bit of a time-frame in there when project is going okay until you inevitably cut yourself with the utility knife or some such injury that gets you swearing again which eliminates any sympathy coming your way so you bandage yourself up and get back at it and the cycle continues…effort equals progress equals calamity equals redoing work or re-bandaging fingers increasing swearing…and around and around we go.

Eventually, the job gets completed and most of the time it does the trick or even exceeds the expectations but the hassle hardly seems worth the result…or is it the other way around? Either way, another task is off the list and we’ll have a few days respite before the cycle begins anew with the next item because there is always going to be a next item.

“Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”- Mark Twain, a Biography.