I thought the days of scraped knees and blue shins were behind me, like the childhood days of creating a homemade slip-n-slide out of a plastic drop cloth and using dishwashing detergent as a lubricant. That was the last scraped knee, or was a small gash,I recall having. Maybe childishness never really evaporates, we just grow too uptight to appreciate the joy and begin dismissing it in the name of sophistication. I still adhere to some juvenile traits, like sulking. Mature, huh?

We finished the paver path and the end result feels anticlimactic. Nine months of various stages of planning, designing, compromising and redesigning, unadulterated laziness, deliveries, procrastination, begging and pleading. Completion should be a means to an end, but it falls short. Not of expectations exactly, but something like it…I can’t claim disappoint sans expectations, because how can you be disappointed if you don’t anticipate a minimal return on planning.

I’m displeased all the effort didn’t yield some pinnacle of greatness, or golden idol of suburban idealism. Nope. None of those things. Just a fucking path from the parking pad to the front door.

The neighbors have been complimentary, even generous, with their praise, though I can’t help but wonder are the praising the path itself, or the fact that it only took six months to move three palettes of concrete bricks out of the front yard. All I see are the shortcomings, the squandered preparations, and the micromanaging I’ve endured for the past four days. The slowly executed task transformed into a high priority project because the weather was sucky for execution there was a piece of equipment with an expensive rental contract (tick, tick, tick tick). The results feel paltry compared to the effort, but the neighbors aren’t concerned with such trivial details like my sanity, so the proper response is, thank you, rather than voicing that all inclusive, but…

The path should be enough, but I allowed all sense of accomplishment to be tainted by the journey. I thought if I were patient enough, anticipated enough, and knew enough about the idiosyncrasies about the project foreman, I could rise to the occasion, and be a better partner, but in the end, I just wanted wanted to chew off my own leg to escape, all over micromanaging to the hundredth decimal point. In spite of extensive planning, you can’t adequately expect to influence the basic nature of others. If they are accustomed to solving problems in specific ways, you’re unlikely to influence a change. We are who we are, and we don’t change unless we choose to.