Techniques and strategies help

There are a lot of things I forget a lot of the time, nearly all of them underscoring the sieve-like nature of my short-term memory. I’m developing techniques and strategies to compensate, like my personal organisation system (an update on how that’s going is coming soon). I still forget some things, though, and that can mean I need to re-learn whatever it is I need to know in order to complete a task, like today’s: Dealing with the lawns.

Back in December, the filament in my line trimmer snapped off inside the head, and I had no idea what to do about it. The next month, I used “all my new, old, and new/old skills to solve a problem,” as I put it at the time. This worked great until about a month ago when the line snapped again—and I couldn’t remember how to fix it.

Anticipating the reality that I’d forget how to fix the problem, I’d saved the video I’d watched in January, and I re-watched it and re-learned what to do. It turned out, I’d actually been on the right track, but had forgotten that to tighten or loosen the head, it has to be turned the opposite of normal—I needed it to turn it to the right to open it, and I kept turning it to the left, and merely tightened it.

Re-instructed on what to do, I eventually managed to open the head, but with some difficulty this time: The line was totally jammed inside, which is probably why it snapped as it did. Today I trimmed all the edges out front, and did what I could in the back before the line ran out. I’d loaded all I had left, which wasn’t enough to actually fill it, and I knew that, and that it’d mean I’d run out faster than usual.

Naturally, I also mowed the lawns, and that was a bit more difficult that normal: The lawns were actually very full of moisture, even though they didn’t look it. I thought that after two sunny days, and maybe three without any rain, they’d be reasonably dry; I was mistaken.

This is the autumn and winter reality: The lawns grow more slowly, but they tend to be quite moist near the ground, and that makes the mower work harder (I needed both batteries today). I’d noticed weeks ago how all the rain we had this past summer had made the lawns quite lush, and that only added to the strain on the mower.

There’s been a lot of rain over the past few weeks—well, months, actually—and that obviously affects my mowing, sometimes delaying it by a week. In summer, that’s awful, but at this time of year it’s not (because the lawns grow so much more slowly). Even so, this particular time I was both later than I’d have liked, and dealing with some urgency: We’re about to experience heavy rain from an “atmospheric river”, and I couldn’t be sure I’d get another chance to mow before the rain starts, let alone before the potentially “torrential rain” hits. The linetrimmer was an important part of that: I made sure to use it to completely clear the in-lawn drain in the back.

This story is about mowing the lawns again, sure, but it’s also about the things I need to do manage even ordinary chores. In this case, I had to re-learn something I’d already learned maybe three months ago, but I anticipated that would be necessary at some point and made sure I could watch the video to relearn the task. And everything worked exactly as I anticipated, which makes me feel vindicated, more than anything.

This is also an example of of me paying attention to both current and predicted conditions when planning my chores. I find that easier than remembering stuff, quite possibly because it’s right in front of me in the moment.

In any case, today I managed to mow my lawns, trim the edges out front and most of the edges out back, I prepared for a possible “weather event”, and I was able to do all that because I’ve learned the importance of developing techniques and strategies to compensate for my memory/focus problems.

Finding a path forward, even to manage simple chores, can sometimes mean figuring out what works for us. It took me far too many decades to work that out, but the important thing is that I have now—and I’m not done yet.

And, of course, I’m also not done dealing with the lawns. I just appreciate being able to deal with that shore a bit more easily than I used to.

Update – April 29, 2023: It's clearly a very good thing that I mowed the lawns yesterday: Rain is probably/possible for the entire week (see graphic below). Today washeavily overcast most of the day—often extremely dark—but there was no rain. That'll arrive here sometime overnight or tomorrow morning. Great.