Why So Much Faffing?

Assuming that I haven’t been led astray as the dirtiness of the word “faff” I’ll relate why I tend to bog down and spend a lot of time engaged in “faffing” and don’t get much done.

Gaps. Gaps in modeling. When I take a “break” from model building, it’s like a cook who shuts down a kitchen. The oven goes cold. The freshest foods get old and and stuff in the fridge gets pushed to the back.

Everybody gets rusty. Even the knives.

To restart the kitchen is a job. You have to fire up the burners, heat up the ovens, check to make sure that it’s all working. The knives need sharpening. To move from dead cold to “active” is a chore and it takes time.

Model building is the same way, although we tend to ignore that part of it. You go on a trip, write a book, spend some time at the mental hospital, go to war, fall in love, start a career at a Youtuber– when you go back to the workbench all is different.

The kids stole your putty. The cat ate your putty. The dog ate your putty. And so on. Paints “get solid” and have to be awakened with a good stir. Stuff evaporates. EXPENSIVE stuff evaporates. References get “filed.” Tools get lost. Parts from one kit end up in another box.

To straighten this out takes time and faffing. It doesn’t help when Testors quits making paint and acts like the biggest bunch of little bitches in creation.

But I digress…

So to get things back up and running is always a chore. When you shut anything down– a yacht, a major corporation, an airplane, a tiny man cave with model stuff– whatever you have– you have to spend time cranking it back up.

And if you’re like me, you build a model. Then stop and think about whether this hobby has reached its zenith, which is another word for “end of the line”– but no, and you have to crank up every time you start up.

And being old and having months flash buy like weeks (or days) doesn’t help. I barely have time to find my reading glasses and the workshop is a shambles.

Oh for the days when it was constant and I was constant. Perpetual motion. Always reaching, grasping, aspiring to “make the next one better” and fixating on perfection always out of reach.