I'm So Knotty

Mom left to spend the weekend at our brother's after lunch and I set out spend the afternoon putting bookmarks in all of the NF books I checked out at the Longview library yesterday.  More than a dozen.  The idea was to have a leisurely browse through them as well.  But I found the beaded strings on my bookmarks in a serious tangle.

This had happened the weekend before Christmas when the mug holding my bookmark collection fell off my desk and spilled.  I didn't have time to fuss with it then so I just scooped them up and stuck them back in the mug willy-nilly and then last weekend I packed that mug along with the books, bookends and other desk misc I expected to need while here at Mom's.

I knew they were tangled but I didn't think it was that bad.  I've had to untangle them before.  Usually two or three at a time though.  This time there were eight tangled together and it was bad.  And it got worse before it got better.

In less than an hour I had two of them separated out and I thought I was on a roll and would have them all in less than another hour.  But Somehow in untangling those two I'd increased the snarl and snugged it tight on all of the rest.  There wasn't anymore give in the thread for creating loose loops to push the beads on the ends of the long strings through.

Three hours later I was about ready to take scissors and chop the string spaghetti into string rice.  Instead I cut the beads off the ends of one of the strings and tried to untangle that string from all the rest but after another hour I had done the same to two more of the strings and managed to get those two bookmarks off their strings. But the snarl was no smaller.

In the end it took over ten hours get those bookmarks freed of their sister's stranglehold.

Why.  Why.  Why do I do things like this?

I have miles of thread in any color I could wish for.  I could have cut the beads off the string and the strings off the bookmarks in the first fifteen minutes and had them all restrung in another two hours or less and given the snarl to the cat for a toy.

And why, why, why, if I'm able to be so persevering in something so inconsequential am I unable to apply that same perseverance to finishing one of my stories or cleaning up those 9 NaNo Novel files?

Twelve hours on the crafter's tote project, a piece of which is seen in the picture above, would have given me three more strips ready to join on the second panel.

Twelve hours is enough time to finish reading the ARC and write the review for next week's blog tour.

Twelve hours might have allowed for the fixing of metadata for several hundred ebooks.

Twelve hours equals 6 to 8 movies or half a season of a fav TV drama on NetFlix

Twelve hours could have caught me up on the sleep I've been cheating myself of because it always seems I have too much important stuff to get done.  Too important to set aside for sleep.  Yet not important enough apparently to set aside a snarl of string for.