Parkinson's Law

Ever heard of Parkinson's Law? Some dude (named Parkinson) wrote an essay for The Economist back in the 50's that began with the (now semi-famous) words, "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." I remember one of my high school teachers sharing this old adage with us -probably in reference to some fast approaching deadline I had completely disregarded- but had forgotten the source until about 2 minutes ago, when I googled it. Despite my teacher's failed attempt to compel scholarly participation, I never forgot the spirit of the Law; which, said to me, "No matter how hard you try, you will always be at least 15 minutes late to everything", also, "Go ahead and procrastinate because starting early only creates more work." Faulty logic? Perhaps. It's hard to tell. All I really wanted to say was that I worked all day, and still have a hard time putting my finger on what exactly I accomplished. The point, without hard accountability, a looming, stress-inducing deadline, I am liable to nit-pick a project indefinitely. Perpetuating its state of "near-completion". I'm working on it, but today, I fought Parkinson's Law, and Parkinson's Law won.

I'm making my own deadline: dinner time(ish) tomorrow. There.

Picture time:

That awkward moment when you step off the roof of your truck, clamber on to the chicken coop you're trying to shingle, inadvertently shift the balance of the trailer beneath the coop and nearly rock yourself right into a comical fall onto a pile of tools.

This gat's pneumatic... yo.

Love those shingles.

Hacking out a super-quick wooden mallet out of a nice, dry piece of pear tree wood. The mallet is for pounding a froe. A froe is something you will see in the next shot.

This is a real-deal froe, maybe 100+ years old. I got it at the antique mall (like the draw knife, if you recall). These things were standard tools back in the day. You drive it down like a wedge, then torque the handle to split the wood. You can make planks, shingles, slats or whatever. Pretty cool if you're into to making something out of nothing.

Getting it started in the right spot is important, as the goal is to take that split through the length of the material.

This little log probably could have been split by a hatchet or something, but you sacrifice a lot of control that way. By bracing the log below the split and pulling on the fat side, you can draw the split back in to the center when you crank on the froe.

Normally, you'd use a tool like this to split fat sections of trunk into halves, quarters, eighths, and so on until you have a ton of almost flat planks. A little work with a drawknife or plane trims everything up. I just used a hatchet to square these halves up a touch.

These are going on opposite ends of the coop, to support the roosting poles.

Cool looking wood.

My greatest accomplishment today, slipping 10-15 lengths of PVC pipe under the coop, so it will easily roll when we unload it. I tried it, totally works. Tomorrow I will lay the floor down, among other things.

Off to Fincastle tomorrow, as long as I don't get in my own way. I've got the nesting boxes to put together, floor to throw down and hutches to build, probably a couple of other things I'm not thinking of.

-F.W.