Perhaps because I am "of an age" where I didn't grow up with the Internet — and am not attached to a cell phone like it was a part of my head — I find that I need to take screen breaks on a regular basis.
It used to be that it was just too much TV that annoyed me, but in this day and age I just have to get away from sitting in front of the computer — even though I do so for my work — because it starts driving me nuts.
In some ways, I am the exact opposite of our thirtysomething kids. They start to get fidgety if they can't get to their phone for more than 10 or 15 minutes; I start to get fidgety if I can't get up and do something that doesn't involve a screen after maybe a couple of hours or so.
Sure, when I find a particular groove with something work related, I can stay with it all day... but those incidences are uncommon.
During the summer, at least, I find that yardwork is by far my best way to get away from screens. It doesn't really have anything to do in with feeling like I'm being productive, but getting my hands in the dirt and actually working with the wilderness sometimes passes for our yard feels very real and not at all virtual in any way.
Our home happens to sit on a large corner lot, meaning that we have two sides of frontage onto our neighborhood roads, and everything has to be maintained in such a way that our "HOA police" doesn't send us nasty grams about maintenance.
It's funny... when we moved here some almost 20 years ago this was basically a place mostly populated by old hippies who had built fishing cabins decades ago and then eventually upgraded them to full-time living. Translation: the overall atmosphere was generally pretty laid back. It was a nice middle class neighborhood.
The overgrown mess I started working on, today
But with the skyrocketing trajectory of property prices we have gone from being "nice, but pretty average" to being far more gentrified and upscale, and being surrounded by million dollar properties. The prices seem to be in a bubble. To wit, when I moved here in 2006 the median property price was about $165,000, and today it is about $735,000.
Even though we live in the exact same house we originally bought — and thus it has the same value to us — the external world has gone to from viewing us as a normal neighborhood to being one of the very swank areas of town. Hence the HOA yard police are far stricter than they used to be.
So today I went out and worked on a little patch of frontage where we're having a dead tree cut down next week, tidying it up and mowing it and pulling blackberry vines out of another tree so that nobody will complain about it.
All in all, it was actually very satisfying work and it gave me some time away from the eternal screens, tearing at the wilderness and — in my head at least — cursing the homeowners association for their eternal oversight. Can't complain too loudly, though, because we do enjoy living in a reasonably clean looking neighborhood5555555 r 4555553½3s.
This evening, my arms are sore, and I have lots of scratches from blackberry vines, and various small bumps and itchy spots from more than a few stinging nettles getting to the inside of my arms where the heavy welding gloves didn't quite cover.
It looks better out there, but I also feel a distinct sense of accomplishment from my work in a way I don't really feel from any of my online work. Not even from writing blog posts on Hive!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!
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2026.07.13 00:39 PDT
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