Overlooking the Obvious

After watching a fitness show I decided I was going to work out 45 minutes a day, six days a week for 60 days. Only I have no room indoors anymore to work out, so the alley is where I work out. So I get all set up, and realize I need both a clock and a radio. The battery in the garage clock is dead, so I run back inside to get a battery and the radio. I'm thinking a calendar and a noteboard would be nice too.
So I get all set up, I'm about 10 minutes into my workout, when my neighbor parks right behind me in the alley and sits there with his family in the car, Then my other neighbor does the same. Once again I'm feeling like a goldfish in a bowl. So I hang out for 15 or 20 minutes waiting for them to drive off or get out or something. Ugh. But while I'm standing there, I'm staring at the wide side of a steel file cabinet that's been sitting in that same spot since the day we moved in. And then it hits me. That's a great place for a magnetic board to write on with dry erase markers or I could put chalkboard paint on it and make a place to write things about projects.Talk about overlooking the obvious! Then I say to myself, how can I do it with stuff I already own? Magnets! I have lots of magnets parked on the fridge that aren't doing anything. So I close and lock the garage, and start to go in the house to get a calendar and the magnets and so on. Then the neighbors drive away (face palm).
I also grab some unopened tools to put on my new pegboard (see yesterday's post). I grab a lidded plastic container to put my radio on and a metal can to use as a pen holder and catch all because right now the pens and razor blades and little things are all just laying in a shallow box on top of the file cabinet. It seems silly to just put an empty container there to park my radio on, so I fill it with all those little sharp scroll saw blades and so forth. I write 'sharp' on it with a permanent marker. I fill the can with pencils and the new scissors I just unwrapped. I used the magnets to hold a sheet of paper on there for notes. And I used clear shipping tape to secure the calendar, being careful not to tape down the flipping pages. I put a new battery in the clock.
Just when I started to work out again, my neighbor came home again and left his car parked illegally in the alley and went into his garage. Sigh. At least I broke a sweat and got my garage more organized.