Stress Control: First insight

In two small moments of Insight, I recently figured out how to cut down the Himalayan Range of chores that face me every morning and thereby relieve a great deal of daily stress.

My days start with more work than I can easily handle, most of it ditzy stuff that frustrates because it’s never done. Even as you’re plowing through chore after chore after endless chore and you’re just beginning to see what you hope will be the end of it, whack! There’s a pot you forgot to wash, another plant to water, a new mess to clean up, another timer dinging at you. And it’s tooth-grindingly frustrating because you know that when you finally do finish, tomorrow morning you’ll have to do it all over again.

A major contributor at this time of year is the pool. The summer winds have come in, bringing no rain but bushels and bushels of devil-pods and strappy devil-pod tree leaves. I took Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner up to Leslie’s to be fixed after he came to a dead stop in the shallow end; turns out he’d quit because he was choked with devil pods.

While I was gone, the pool’s system came on. Checking to be sure I’d remembered to put the skimmer basket in, I realized the pump’s circulating action had raked all the pods and leaves into a couple of big mounds, up against the pool’s north wall. With the debris piled in one place, it was pretty easy to suck up the litter into the bonnet cleaner—a chore that usually takes a half-hour or forty minutes, when I have to run the thing back and forth over the entire floor of the 18,000-gallon pool and over all the steps, and then flip it over and try to skim the worst of the twigs and palm-tree detritus off the water’s surface. With Harvey’s hose disconnected from the skimmer pipe, the pump had pulled all the floating debris into the skimmer basket—a half-bushel of junk that didn‘t eventually drop to the bottom to choke Harvey again.

Studying this much-easier-to-deal-with state of affairs, it occurred to me that I could pull Harvey out of the pool in the evening and drop in the skimmer basket. Then, instead of running the pump from about 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., I could set the timer to come on around 4:00 a.m. By the time I got out of bed at 5:30 or 6:00, the system would have run 90 minutes or two hours, long enough to push the junk on the bottom into a single pile and to skim the floating trash off the top. Then I’d only have about ten minutes of work to clean up the Harvey-gagging stuff. Once that junk was out of the way, all I’d have left to do is drop Harvey back in the water, where he could vacuum up the dust that blows in every evening.

“All I’d have left,” because it also dawned on me…duh! Hosing the dust and incipient algae off the tiles and pool walls doesn’t have to be done at the crack of dawn! As long as it’s done every day or so, it can wait until evening, when I usually go in the pool anyway.

So! Next morning, an hour and a half to two hours of daily drudgery dropped to about 20 or 30  minutes of easy work.

That freed time to take the dog for a walk before the heat came up and still enjoy breakfast 90 minutes or an hour earlier than usual. By 8:00 in the morning I was ready to leave the house: something that normally doesn’t happen before 9:30 or 10:00.

Better yet, I didn’t feel just whipped when I climbed into the car. The jaws were not clenching, I felt much calmer on the road, I did not (for a change) feel like murdering my fellow drivers. And though I could do without spending my days at GDU, for the first time in many a moon I did not arrive at the office with a chip on my shoulder.

Refreshing!

Tomorrow: A second liberating insight