We have never printed even a faux-Lego or Marvel action figure with that thing. Yup, it’s on the list.
Yesterday, I made a list of the projects that I have lined up for the summer. The list has 10 items. Build a shed. Clean the garage. Start a podcast. Things like that. Then I noticed something. Five of my “to-do” items are projects that I’ve begun at other times, but are, today, in various stages of “unfinished.” I’ve been dwelling on this realization that for the last 24 hours and I’ve come to a conclusion.
I’m not a finisher.
I am great at generating ideas. I’m great at planning, I love trouble-shooting and learning through that process. I’m even pretty good at launching, but I’m not a finisher.
I’m pretty handy.
Around Christmas, we pulled the carpet from our upstairs (the bedrooms and landing). Over the course of a few weeks, we patched up dings in the walls, painted, and generally redecorated. Then, I put in hard wood flooring. It is gorgeous and makes the upstairs feel much cleaner and elegant. But though I replaced all of the baseboards, I never did get around to putting that quarter-round trim on that gives the edges a sharp, finished look. It’s on the list.
Having finished the upstairs, we decided that the carpet needed to come off the stairs as well, and, about a month ago, I pulled it out. I replaced the stair treads with hardwood, pulled all of the staples from the risers, filled the holes with wood putty and cleaned and sanded them smooth. Then, I stained and polyurethaned the treads. The risers and side trim are still awaiting the lovely white finish that will complete the project. This too, is on the list.
Like I said, I’m pretty handy, but I don’t finish.
I also make things. I’m a maker…well, a partial maker, an almost maker.
For example, I built a display board from an old 17” flat-screen PC monitor and a SoC mini-computer that’s housed in a slim, custom-made finished wood rame. It sits on our kitchen counter, occasionally displaying the weather, traffic conditions to work, daily schedules and our current grocery needs all based on information that family members enter into their personal calendars or to-do lists on their phones. It’s an amazing piece of technology integration that I’m super proud of, except when it’s not working, which is anytime we have a power outage or lose our internet connection; then the screen updates to “404, Object Not Found” and stays that way until I get around to logging into it and manually pointing it back to the right internet feed. I’m sure it’s a relatively minor matter, an hour at most, to script it to do this automatically, but, as of today, we’ve been “404’ing” for about a week. It’s on the list.
Almost exactly a year ago, my son and I started building a 3-D printer from parts. Over the course of a few days, we went from knowing nothing to having a fully assembled skeleton with three stepper motors to move a print carriage, either by belt or screw, through three axises of motion. A fourth motor, on the print carriage itself would feed the spooled plastic to the print head, which is, basically, a large, scary, frantically moving hot glue gun from hell. Then, we set it aside, never having even powered it up. It sat on my workbench gathering dust for six months until we pulled it out on a bored whim again in March. We wired up the electrical components and control board and plugged it in. To our surprised glee, it powered up, passing its own internal diagnostics, and then we turned it off, content that we’d conquered the biggest technical hurdles. We have never printed even a faux-Lego or Marvel action figure with that thing. Yup, it’s on the list.
My son loves video games. I don’t play them much any more, but when I was a kid, I loved the cabinet-style arcade games at the bowling alley my parents dragged me to every Tuesday night. Asteroids, Defender, Frogger, Pac-Man…that sort of thing. Later, I was peripherally interested in early console games, though I never owned one (a Sega Genesis) until college. I was more into tinkering with computers as they grew from curiosities to legitimate tools for creating. Anyway, my son and I decided to build an game emulator housed in an arcade-style cabinet for our basement. We put it through its paces, getting the PC board to run just about every old game we could think of in emulation and then, as an added bonus, we added emulators for Atari 2600, Nintendo, SNES, Sega Genesis…everything all the way through Playstation 2 and XBox. Then we built the most gorgeous cabinet to house the whole thing. We researched and learned how to wire old analog buttons and ball-top joysticks into modern USB controllers and added them to the cabinet. It is truly a thing of beauty and, when it’s up and running, is the biggest attraction of our rec room, beating out foosball and air hockey easily. When it’s up and running. Right now, it’s throwing update errors and not a single game will launch. It’s beautiful, backlit marquee taunting us with past glories. Someday…someday it will come off the list.
The truth is that I like the challenge of doing things, but don’t care much about actually having done them, if that makes sense. It’s like, having proven that I CAN do a thing, I don’t much care for the thing any longer. It’s weird.