Patience

Not the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The virtue.

Over and over, people tell me, "You must have an incredible amount of patience to do this detailed work". Frankly, I'm always surprised to think of myself as a patient person. When in the express lane at the grocery, I have to remind myself over and over that I'm not really in any sort of a hurry. When my daughters can't find their cleats and we're late for their soccer practice, I often glower at them and sigh with frustration. When my family was traveling, one of my father's favorite phrases was "Come on people. We've got to make time!". This usually uttered to hurry my mother and me as we ate.

Patience isn't a virtue of mine. Not really. To me, virtue implies some active goodness, some force of will to overcome the fundamental and sinful impatience that is, as humans, our birthright.

Instead when I sit down to build a model, I lose track of time. I sit down at 9:30am; work for half an hour; look up and it is 5:30 in the afternoon. This total absorption in the task at hand is utterly pleasing to me. Stories run through my head as I build. Problems of shape and color. Lost tweezers. Intense pleasure in creation. But patience? How can there be patience without a sense of time passing?

In fact, the failure to sense time has become a problem for me. Now that I am trying to build models for sale, I have to be able to track my time. When people ask, "How much time do you have in that building?", I need to be able to answer them with something more than "Um, about 40 hours?"

To solve this problem, my first thought was to purchase a chess clock. Then my dear wife pointed out, "Surely someone makes some software to help with this exact problem". As usual, she was right. After spending too much time on the Apple site, I found an application that should do the trick. TaskTime4 is a shareware program from ToThePointSoftware.

Now the trick will be to remember to start and stop the clock.