My "can-do" attitude - a blessing and a curse

I've always had a can-do attitude. Other words used to describe this aspect of my personality include drive, determination, problem-solving, confidence, stubbornness, pride and self-righteousness. Notice how those terms gradually shifted from being admirable qualities to character flaws?

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Been there, done that. "Blessing" side.

This weekend was an example of the "curse" side. Ben was gone all weekend on a family ice-fishing trip. Not a huge deal. The only thing to arrange for him to be away was that someone needed to put wood in the outdoor wood burners that heats our house and my in-laws house (his dad was on the trip too).

We are so fortunate to have neighbors and friends who are willing to help out. He actually arranged for one of them to do the wood while he was away.

I just had to open my big mouth. I said I could do the wood - I didn't want to be the damsel in distress who needed a guy to take care of us. I could handle it.

Surely, I could. But did I really want to?

At the time I did. I like physical work and I really like being tough. I would much rather be doing physical work than housework. So it was a task I was happy to take on.

Four problems:

1. I had plenty of other tasks that also needed to be done without adding this.
2. It was bitterly cold the first couple days he was gone so now I volunteered to go out in that weather.
3. The logs are big. I could lift them, but it definitely got my heart rate up. My father-in-law actually scoured through his piles and found all the smaller pieces and stacked them neatly right by the burner. Not sure if he felt bad for me or doubted that I could do it. Either way, it was nice. 
4. I had to arrange doing all this twice a day in two locations while supervising two little kids who couldn't be alone in the house and it was too cold for them to be out with me. 

After a couple times doing it, time got away from me Friday night. I went out there at 11:30 p.m. and didn't see much sign of life to the fire. Even though Ben gave me all the instructions, he hadn't really told me how to get it going from pretty much nothing. It was too late to call anyone. I freaked out a little, put wood in and prayed it would start up. I stayed awake another hour to see if the water temperature rose at all, signaling that it had started. Nope. It dropped slightly.

Without anything else to do, I went to bed..at least I tried to. I was pretty worked up. My logic told me it would be a big deal to just call the neighbor and see if he could help get it going in the morning. The house temperature wouldn't drop that much overnight for there to be any serious problems. That was my logic, which proved to be correct.

What really kept me awake was my irritation that I had failed. Grrrr. My pride was hurting. A lot.

After stewing about it for a couple days, I finally processed the take-away silver lining. Now that I've accepted that maybe I don't want to put wood in, I conveniently have an "out." When you can't do the task well, then it's easier to have someone else do it. It's like various farm tasks growing up - we would purposely avoid learning some of the roles because then we couldn't be expected to do them. Since I didn't really succeed at learning to do the wood, I'm sure I can easily get out of it in the future.

Unless my "can-do" attitude gets the best of me again...