What's it worth?

Those Mastercard commercials are so ubiquitous that they've become shorthand in our culture. You know, the "insect repellent, 5 dollars; allergy medicine, 6 dollars; not spending your vacation scratching and sniffing? Priceless" commercials?

I was reminded of that as I surveyed my not-very-quickly-building layout domain in the garage. Because I changed the plan significantly post-first sawdust, I had to change the staging yard from one side of the garage to the other, then change the location of the loop in staging from one end of the yard to the other.

Throughout, I was trying to keep the forlorn and lonely body tracks of the original staging shelf. This led to an increasingly challenging series of mental and ladder gymnastics to try to make everything line up, even though I had flipped the whole thing end-for-end and side-to-side.

Then I realized, what was I actually saving? A piece of homasote and some flex track. Now it's true I hate to waste ... growing up with two parents who lived through and remembered vividly the Great Depression will do that to you. Oh, and I am what you'd call ... er ... stubborn.

But this had gone past frugality to stupidity. So in one swift motion, before I could change my own mind, I backed out the handful of screws holding homasote to plywood, broke the thing into chunks, and stuffed it into the trash can.

Not having to live for years with an earlier mistake? Priceless.