Friday, January 18, 2013

Today’s Lesson: READ THE INSTRUCTIONS


When it comes to progress, I live life in the fast lane. If I can do it faster, I’m game. Meeting Jason has taught me a lot of valuable lessons in how this is a risky approach to always take. Since he loves projects, I’ve seen many more of them in progress while being with him – and a few more examples of projects gone wrong (and the disastrous effects).

To Jason’s credit, one of the biggest lessons he has deliberately taught me is the importance of taking things slowly. Not only is there more to be enjoyed in taking your time working on a project you enjoy, but you can also prevent a lot of mistakes from happening if you give each step the time it deserves.

Unfortunately I had a case-in-point example of this recently when working on some crafty things for our wedding reception.

I invested in a circle-cutter because circles are my arch-nemesis in the crafting world. I can’t draw or cut a perfect circle for my life. So when the circle-cutter came in the mail I was SO EXCITED to see how much easier this was going to make my life! The excitement was so overwhelming that I decided to just go full speed ahead, not watching the extremely helpful tutorial the company had posted on YouTube or reading the customer reviews for helpful tips.

Well…you wanna know what happened…

This is a picture of the table I decided to arrogantly try the circle-cutter on. This is also the table that Jason’s siblings ate numerous dinners at while growing up, and the table that Jason spent hours staining the perfect color black to match our apartment two years ago…my heart STOPPED when I saw what I had done.

So now after watching that previously mentioned YouTube video, and refraining from using the circle cutter until my self-healing cutting mat came in the mail (per the advice of many happy circle-cutter users) I am forever changed.

New experiences are exciting, and new tools can make you feel like a kid on Christmas morning, but my god, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PEOPLE! The circle-cutter I bought didn’t say anything about using a mat underneath it or anything like that, but if I had taken a few minutes to let my common sense kick in, I probably would have thought to cut on a better surface than the one I chose, and we would still have our desk sans-circles.

So anyways, lesson learned :)

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