I’m a terrible homeowner.

I’m not making this up, I’m truly the worst. I hate working around the house. and the thought of yard work brings a tear to my eye, because I mourn the loss of every weekend that was wasted, when it could  have been spent doing something fun.

While my neighbors trim their hedges and manicure their lawns, I stare at my small patch of grass and try to mindfully will it to stop growing. I thought about getting a goat to eat the grass, but then I’d have to pick up goat poop, and that would be worse. I do eventually mow it, about twice a year whether it needs it or not.

And don’t even get me started about raking. I have so many oak trees in my yard that I don’t rake leaves up, I need to use a snow shovel to move them. My prefered method for picking up the leaves in the yard is to wait until Mother Nature covers them up with a pretty white blanket of snow, then I’ll deal with it in the spring.

Just getting leaves of my driveway, can take me an entire weekend, and I can’t put the driveway off  because the damn leaves  will clog up my snow blower when show comes in the winter.

For the record, I can’t stand running the snow blower either. Thank goodness for my brother-in-law and his plow. He takes care of me when we get a lot dumped on us, and if I can avoid using the snow blower I will.

I’s not that I’m lazy, I just hate doing this stuff, so I always find a reason to put it off. But some time ago, we had a small fire in one of the spare bedrooms. There was no major damage thanks to the quick action of my son who put it out, but it ruined the carpet and it needed to be replaced immediately.

So, on a Tuesday night, I stopped by a flooring store, picked up the material I needed and replace the whole thing by 11:00 that night. I Didn’t do a bad job either given the amount of time I did it in and the fact I hadn’t installed  carpet in thirty years.

The point to all this is something my father told me when I was a kid. I had tried to explain to him  that the reason I couldn’t get something done was I simply didn’t have enough time to do it. I can’t remember exactly what it was that I didn’t want to do, but whatever the task at hand was, I was using lack of time as the excuse for it not getting done.

He told  me “Mark, you find the time to do the things you want to do.”

I thought he was crazy, and he didn’t understand how difficult it was to be 14 years old. A kid that age has a great deal of responsibilities, and he just didn’t get it. It was obvious to me that being a teenager in the 80s was much tougher than when he was a kid, during the depression and the Second World War. I was convinced my dad didn’t know what he was talking about.

But now that I’m older, I understand more than ever how right he was. That rug had actually needed to be replaced for a while, and I alway put it off because it wasn’t important enough.  When I had to replace it, I did an entire flooring job in five hours.

Now, this “Blog post ever day” endeavor I have set out on reminds me of this fact. I went months without writing anything, but now that I’ve obligated myself to doing it every day, no matter what, it gets done one way or another. Regardless if it’s thoughtful insight or really bad jokes, I’ve made it important so I find the time, and a way to make it happen.

Think about this when you you tell yourself, or someone else that you don’t have time to exercise, or cooking a healthy meal takes too long so you pick up some nasty bag of crap from your favorite drive through window. If getting healthy is important to you, you will find a way to do it. If it isn’t,  you’ll find an excuse why you can’t.

Like the way I use this blog as an excuse not to cut my grass.

Don’t judge me.