Avoidance Redux

It's very hard work to avoid doing that which you do not want to do.  I went out to the barn (Steve's part) to get more material for The Project.  I wasn't going to work on The Project; that would have been too obvious a ploy and it's an excuse that has been used before.  That part of the barn, the largest section, is and has been a mess, a conglomeration of tools, odd equipment, Steve's collections of whatever he found interesting at any given moment, boxes of outdated papers, cans of nails and screws, welding rods for welding machines we no longer have, and the largest group of et cetera this side of a flea market.  Steve's philosophy was that nothing should ever be thrown away, "You just never know...."  An example:  two cordless drills (a good thing), but the two nearby chargers had the plugs cut off the cords.  I don't know why the plugs had been removed.  One can assume that someday he would replace them, but....  There is a long workbench along one wall, piled high with bits and bobs of this and that, tools that never found their way back to the toolbox, and plenty of dust and Thing droppings.  Perfect!  I set to with a will.  I cleaned and organized, pitched the obviously broken and unusable and, in the end, have a workbench where one could actually do something and find the necessary items to do it.  Bess wandered in and out, sneezing at the dust, supervising a while and going back out to lie in the sun.  Cleaning the workbench is only a drop in the bucket compared to the entire room, but it wouldn't be prudent to take it all on at one go.  I'll save up excuses for another day.