Sometimes Materials Don't Matter

I'm breathing slightly heavy now. Trying to calm down so that I can go to bed. Why am I breathing heavy? I tend to forget to breath when I'm concentrating on a complex or unusual task. It's the concentration that makes me forget; no stress is involved. I just finished such a task.

Locking the doors up for the night and getting ready to do the dishes that I'm too tired to do now, I heard the familiar tone in my wife's voice that means she needs me for something she deems husband worthy. Usually these things are cleaning up messes that reek, taking the trash out, rushing her to the hospital to save another finger at 4am, the usual stuff. So I went upstairs. The toilet chain is broken. By chain I mean the stupid rubber thing they used in place of a chain; by broken I mean irreparably snapped in two.



So I start the search. I shuffle around for some sort of chain to replace it with; no luck, unless you count the 5 pound chains that go to my hammock. Then I start scrounging for a wire hanger; again no luck, we moved to plastic years ago. Grr! Here is where it starts to get frustrating. So I went out to the recreation room where my wife had started unpacking the garage stuff from our move ... 6 months ago or more; the boxes being whittled down to about 4-5 left now.

There! Right in the center of the pile of screws and stuff was an old phone cord. That's a prime target when you need wire fast. They are after all, obsolete to a person who's been reliant on cell phones only for years.

(this is sort of what the pile looks like)


So I grab that and a box cutter and trudge back upstairs, flush the toilet by hand only to have it refill, turn the water off, flush the toilet by hand again, and start the dirty, rusty, grimy work of removing the old plastic and retro fitting this wire on.

After finally trimming the cover down enough so that I can tie one end in a double slip knot after threading it through the bottom flange, I started thinking about a friends job predicament, and while doing cutting the other side an epiphany of a sort hit me. Sometimes the materials you are using don't matter.

Then the two thoughts merged in to one. As a free lancer I often have to just keep the jobs rolling even if they aren't always ideal. More often than not the projects are under funded and in desperate need of someone who can make it work with the materials given. Sometimes the materials don't matter; what you do with them matters; knowing what to do with them matters most of all.