2014-05-18 – Sometimes when I’m sitting at the desk in my subterranean lair, I begin to notice a sound. Wub-wub-wub-wub. That’s the sound of the washer trying to spin an unbalanced load. I get up and rearrange the clothes trying to achieve sufficient balance so that the basket will reach whirl velocity so that the clothes will be wrung out sufficiently to go into the dryer. If I don’t do that, the drying cycle won’t do the job. I’ll have to dry the clothes two or three times to get them dry. Properly whirled clothes will dry in one cycle.

I’ve been hearing a lot of wub-wub-wub latetly. Maybe the washer is getting tired. Maybe I’m spending more time at my desk. Maybe both.

Another thing I’ve notice about the laundry is that it never gets completely done. Oh, the spot under our laundry chute (which is where the process starts) sometimes get completely clear. But that condition doesn’t ever persist for more than one cycle of laundry.

There are a lot of jobs like this. Lately, I’ve been feeding the cats. I never realized this before, but cats don’t seem to remain fed. I give them plenty to eat. But not much more than one laundry cycle later, they want more. We actually “run out” of cat food. I put “run out” in quotes because I keep having to run out to the pet store to get more.

And then there’s the garden. We have a very nice garden. It’s not planned or anything. It’s filled with plants, which we randomly add to each year with a couple trips to the nursery. If you don’t water the plants, sometimes it rains and they are okay. But sometimes it’s dry and they die.

Unless you water them.

And I do that. But I notice that the plants are like the cats. There’s never enough. If I watered yesterday, you’d think it would be enough. But today I have to water them again. I don’t get it.

In my recent job, I had a chance to work on a course about project management. Project management is a very rigorous field and usefully defines a project as a collection of work that has a beginning, middle, and end.

Washing clothes, feeding cats, watering gardens. No beginning, middle , or end. Just endless cycles.

Wub-wub-wub-wub.

Excuse me. I think I have an unbalance load.