My Plans For The Yardwork Are Ruined

For the record, these are the things I need to do when it comes to "outside" things -- and they have to be done in order:

• Rake the leaves in the backyard;
• Bag up all the leaves;
• Take the leaves to the local composting site;
• Mow the frontyard;
• Mow the backyard;
• Spread fertilizer in the frontyard;
• Spread fertilizer in the backyard;
• Pull in the new car behind the fence on one side;
• Pull in the old car behind the fence on the other side;
• Buy a tarp;
• Put the tarp over the new car;
• Put the tarp over the old car;

And then I'm done.  But I have to do all those things.  And I need to do them in this order, because it's much more difficult to do them out-of-order.  To illustrate, I need to tell you that lawnmower is in the shed in the backyard, and it's very inconvenient to move it around the car if I've already pulled them behind the fence.  So I have these steps that cannot be reordered or ignored.  I had to do them in these steps to make it perfect.

I was, and have been, ready to get to these things as soon as possible.  "As soon as" was as soon as I had free time, which was yesterday/Thanksgiving.  So what happened?  It snowed, first damn snowstorm of the year.  Great timing, Mother Nature.  I was raring to go, but I couldn't because there was white stuff covering the leaves, and even though it wasn't much (a quarter of an inch, at most) it was falling all day, so why rake?

At least I was able to spend my time forced indoors to good use: I polished off the Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey, was able to go out and grab a turkey dinner to eat while watching football at home, then I figured out how to spiff up the alumni e-mail communique I had to send for the week, and in the meantime I did another pile of laundry while figuring out why the laundry room is flooding.  (Then again, if I had time to start on my outdoor chores, I would have had no time to do all of these things.  Maybe I'm just busy, period.)  Nevertheless I was, to mangle a couple of aphorisms, fiddling on borrowed time, and just when I waited for the perfect time to execute my plan, winter happened.

So now what?  I really hate doing anything on Saturday because my alma mater's playing in the afternoon, and these things I would really rather devote the whole day to.  (That's why it sucks that they aren't playing in the evening, when I wouldn't be able to do any yardwork anyway.)  Meanwhile the composting site may close as of the 30th, which is a Monday, so if worst comes to worst, I might just decide to skip work and do gather as many leaves as possible to dump them on that day.  And to complicate all of this, I'm not going to move my cars an inch unless I bought tarps for both idled cars, and I haven't even bought the second tarp yet.  These car covers are tricky to purchase; I still don't know which one I should get.  At this rate it may very well be Christmas before I get these cars behind the fence and be completely done with the to-do list above.

Bottom line is that Sunday might be The Day to do all of it, or at least up through the fertilization.  But I don't know if I can even start because, like yesterday, the forecast might be wrong and I might wake up to snow on Sunday.  And if there are several inches, like I have heard, there's going to be no damn reason to even rake the backyard.  And that'll make moving the cars nearly impossible.  (Hell, the cars should be clean before I put the covers on them, and they won't be if this is a big storm.  Shoot, the snow yesterday has already made the cars "dirty.")  There's a chance I could bug out of work early today, but as long as there's snow on the ground, there's nothing I would be able to do.

I hate chores.  I hate stuff I need to do.  And sometimes I just hate having stuff.  This is absolutely overwhelming, and I'm just about ready to give up.