When Procrastination Doesn’t Pay Off

I love me some procrastination, believe it or not. Yes, I set a whole slew of goals for myself, but often the best part of a goal is being able to not do it right this second. (Of course, I don’t tend to procrastinate more than an hour or so, but still. That’s a fun hour, usually.)

However, sometimes there are things you should most definitely *not* procrastinate.

When you live in Maine, and it snows 5 inches, and you snow blow most of it, but you leave the rest because . . . why bother? And then it rains on top of what you left? And then the temperature plummets 40 degrees in a day?

Your driveway turns from snowy wonderland to “skating rink” about as soon as you can say “This is going to take me forever to get rid of.”

So today, on my day off, I trudged outside and spent a while chipping at the inch of ice that has coated my entire driveway. And I barely made a dent. And so I’m left wondering why in the world I didn’t just go outside and scrape it off the driveway when it was still in sluch form?

Because at this point, it’s caught in that terrible zone of “melt during the day, form puddles, and become even smoother ice each night.” That’s a bad zone for your driveway to be in.

I guess I’ll have to go outside again in a few hours and see if I can’t chip some more of it away.

The funny thing is, I remember doing this same thing when I was a kid. Back then. we had a steep driveway, and the bottom of that driveway was a permanent magnet for puddles that would freeze. The whole hill would often become as smooth as a playground slide. My brother and I would be tasked with going out and getting rid of the ice so that the hill was driveable. We tried (almost always too late), and it would take a long time, out there with whatever garden tools we could find that might do the trick, chipping and plinking away at the blasted stuff.

You’d figure all of that practice would have taught me to avoid the situation in the future.

I guess some things take even more lessons than they ought . . .