Back around WoW/Burning Crusade, there was a Horde quest in Feralas to gather some number of Fey Dragonwings. I might have the name slightly wrong. The drop rate sucked. You had to get 30 or 50 of these things, and you’d farm these pretty colored flappy things while they respawned and respawned… for hours. On a pvp server, getting griefed there was hell because you had to keep coming back.
But Fey Dragonwings became a shorthand in our house for any of the sorts of tasks in life that yield to sustained micro-attention because by their nature the path is always upward. It was always the answer with any grind in WoW: just do it. The tickmarks towards completion could only accumulate, never regress.
That’s not true of some tasks — learning piano, for example — but it’s true of the house renovation. (Yes, we’ve been here long enough that we’re repairing reno from the first year before the whole reno is complete. But in a real sense, that’s still not regression.)
Ah, what an eloquent excusing-away I’ve done for having accomplished only a very little today in the upstairs bedroom! Finished a section of moisture barrier plastic, moved the scaffold, and put up almost all the strapping for the next major section of drywall accessible from the current scaffolding position.
That’s, like, one dragonwing.