Don't beat yourself up (I'll do it for you)

Apricot blossom
(photographed late January)

Because one of our flowering apricot trees is starting to overarch our rain gauge, my wife asked me to move the gauge.
    It's mounted on a four-by-four set atop a metal stanchion driven about eighteen inches into the ground, which is hard clay beneath the planting bed's conditioned top soil. It was a bear to pull the post out of the stanchion mount, and three bears to pull the stanchion out of the ground.
    To drive the stanchion back into the ground, about ten feet away, I mounted a shorter length of four-by-four, which I failed to notice fit more snugly than the four-by-four the rain gauge is screwed onto. It seemed to be going to be four or five bears to pull this four-by-four out of the stanchion mount.
    I ended up pulling the stanchion out of the ground (easy because I'd loosened the soil and not driven it in as far as before) and striking the four-by-four on a brick by holding the tapered end of the stanchion roughly the way I held a baseball bat as a boy.
    My wife came out to see what the racket was, and I gave voice to what I was thinking with each swing. "I don't seem to be able to do anything, without doing something stupid at some point."
    "Oh, don't beat yourself up," she said.
    I appreciated that. Nice to hear.
    "Why aren't you wearing safety glasses?"
    I'd actually already realized I'd left them in the garage, but hadn't bothered to go get them.
    "That's a stupid thing to do," she said.

I laid my "bat"down and went to get the safety glasses, reflecting on the way that I had no need to beat myself up, my wife would almost always do it for me.
    But she's earned the prerogative. We've been married forty-six years today.