It's not how many times you fall down...
So...Friday, I got home from work near the depths of despair, because a project I was working on had gone all sorts of wrong...I'm not an experienced carpenter, by any means, but I've done enough construction and set work to feel competent, at least...but several little things all compounded on each other and things were all out of kilter, and I felt totally defeated by it all.
Went home, vegged out in front of a few episodes of Doctor Who...and things started clicking together in my head...understanding where the problems had happened, how things had gotten so far off. And understanding that it was just little stuff...a missed detail here, trying the wrong thing to correct for it there...I felt better.
I went to bed that night, still feeling a bit down, but at least not feeling like I'd totally failed. And, sometime during the night, my brain kept chewing on those little errors. I woke up knowing how to fix almost all of them. Spent Monday correcting those errors...and all those little fixes that came to mind while I was sleeping did the trick. There were still a few more errors that I couldn't bring myself to worry about when the rest of things were so out of whack, but with the big stuff straightened out, I went back to work yesterday, and spent a few more hours making a series of little fixes here and there.
And today, I painted. And it works. Works even better than I'd expected. This was a project I wanted to do last year at this time (well...around this time. We didn't realize, a year ago, that we'd need this done.) Our purchasing department kept bungling the purchase requests...they didn't order the lumber for months, and then they didn't order the hardware to go with it...it took them months longer to order the hardware, and by then all the lumber they'd ordered had been used on other projects, so we had to order it again. Seriously, I started drawing up plans for this right around the end of April last year.
But it's a year later. And the project is done. And it's even better than I thought it would be. And part of me just wants to bust a gut with pride over getting it done at all.
It's been a good week.