Just so busy.

The man had a rising tremor of mania in his voice as he said, "You wake up and you're off and there's never enough time to do everything that needs to be done, and if it's not one thing it's another. Time is scarce here" — and he leanded forward at me: He was barefoot, in a dirty T-shirt, the grubby child nuzzling his legs. "I never have enough time!"

"I'd better be going," I said. [...]

He looked extremely harassed. He clutched his T-shirt. He said, "Now, I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to excuse me. I haven't got all day for chatting. I've got masses of paperwork to get through. That's what I was doing when you came. You interrupted me. You see? Time. Not enough."

— Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania

Commenter A.O.G. implicitly tweaks my nose regarding the slow, dribbly pace of travel pictures. What can I say? It's been a busy few weeks. The thing that I do to make money – well, it's been taking a lot of my attention lately. And now with spring coming on, there's all the maintenance work to be done around the yard – I must balance the disparate demands on my soul – the gentle nurturing act of re-seeding the drought-damaged lawn, with the brutal technological iron fist of Scott's Turf Builder, artificial fertilizer plus herbicide, that must be dumped on the lawn also, to prevent it from becoming nothing but dandelions and clover... oh, and the project list, of new trees and hedges to be planted, new paths to create, and here comes Moira with all the things I was going to do inside the house last year and never got around to – well, you get the point. (Or, at least, you've suffered through my whining.) Brain's just not, uh, in gear.

So, yeah, I'll get to it. Tomorrow, I promise. I think.

(And in the "how pathetic is that?" category, I originally wrote this as a response to A.O.G.'s comment, but then thought, "Hey, I can crank a post out of this!")

Posted by David Fleck at 30 March 2007 07:32 AM