If you look at the photos below, you won’t see a lot of progress. I have one new inside wall up. However, my work has slowed to a crawl. As I’ve mentioned before, it is due to two reasons. One is taking a break to go back and fix mistakes I’ve made. The biggest mistake was not understanding how seismic ties work. I was thinking they were to tie the walls to the wooden sill-plate. However, they tie the walls to the concrete foundation. I’ve had to go back and retrofit them to the concrete footings. What should have taken a couple of hours is now taking an entire week. This is where experience makes a difference, and I’m lacking in that area.

Then there’s the knee/leg injury. Now almost five weeks out. It was starting to get better but got worse again. Of course, I kept working on it. I do have an appointment with a PA next week. This is not cancer related but like the joint aches and pain that most of you (if you are over 50) suffer from. But it’s disappointing to me.

No, I don’t have a schedule to meet with the cottage, not like commercial contractors who must pay fines for delays. But what is driving me is my passion. I love what I’m doing and will love the finishing stages much more than these structural stages.

Someone stated, “Why are you building this cottage? It makes no sense.” To me, it makes tremendous sense. Imagine you are stuck at home, career over, no other humans on the property most of the time. It can be dangerously depressing. Now, I can hardly sleep at night, anticipating the excitement of getting up and moving forward on the work. Before the cottage, I had a one-hour exercise routine each morning. Boring at times. Grueling at other. Now, I don’t have to think about exercising because I end my 6 hours of manual work exhausted. All my muscles screaming . . . and I love it.

Someone asked, “Does it make sense to invest money in this when you are retired or may not live to see it done?” Yes. We are in a housing shortage area and my imagination can go wild with all the benefits of the cottage. The kids can come home and have their own space. We can help others out who have no place to stay. If I don’t survive to see it finished, then I will be like the pharaohs building their pyramids, but a pyramid that becomes a barn for Denise. Finally, I’m on course to build this for 100K and the value of it, unless I mess it up, will be close to three times that much. Sweat equity.

The lesson I’ve learned lately is expressed in the cliché we tell our babes, “Don’t cry over spilled milk.” When I discovered each of my three mistakes, I wanted to kick myself. But what benefit is that? The mature thing to do is to consider how to fix the mistake with excellence, not crying over the hours you’ve added to your work. It is one of the biggest challenges that humans face, unable to move on after they have made a mistake or someone has made a mistake that harms them.

Colloquial clichés carry a lot of wisdom. I’ve said before, one of the greatest theological answers I ever found was in the cliché, “Shit Happens.” It took me ten years (the nineties) to figure this out, and that was with hundreds, if not thousands of hours of study and thinking. I’m a slow learner.

 Many religious folks, and I did when I was religious, create a binary choice in the face of tragedy. Either God is all-powerful and in control, or he loves me. But they try to merge this into a hybrid, God is in control, and he allowed this horrible thing to happen to me BECAUSE he loves me and wanted to teach me something.” It is an absurdity, that has caused so many people to abandon a belief in God. It is wrong, but comforting to think that the creator of the universe micromanges all the tiny details of my life, so that nothing happens by chance or acccident. This is one of the cornerstones in the culture of American Christianity and I saw it in Islam too. I suggest that those who want to believe this, will surely read their Bible (or Koran) that way. Hindus see in their Veda.

The rational way to frame this is there is no reason that an all-powerful and loving God must micromanage your daily life to either prove his power or love. We live in an imperfect world. So, if some guy has a mental breakdown, loads up his AR-15 and marches into a school and kills a bunch of precious, innocent kids, it wasn’t God who handed him the ammunition. You don’t have to feel guilty (as a parent of one of those kids) for screaming your heart out, ripping your clothes (the way my Arab friends do) and washing away the entire village with the tsunami of your tears. Shit happens because the world, as wonderful as it is, has poop stains.

Defining God and putting him in a box of our making is a very “iron age” way of thinking. We now know the universe is at least 13.8 billion light years across and of that age. Most of the universe, e.g., dark matter and dark energy, is totally mysterious to even the smartest of us. So, if that was only a sliver of God’s creative force, how then do we claim that we know this creator. He is not comprehensively knowable by mere mortals.

Is there the possibility that this God does orchestrate personal calamities for a good cause? Maybe, but that idea is not irrational based on God’s mysterous character, but is irrational based on the human experience. It is the human experience that defines the boundaries or limits of such ideas. The proof is in those who have abandoned the idea of a god because of the brutality of the world. But then there are the countless of others who have experience a personal calamity, and remain a believer in God, but on a very candid level, can never trust that God again because of his cruelty.

I guess I will never make a good Presbyterian, will I?

People have assumed–people who didn’t know me well before–that I ask and wrestle with the big questions because of my cancer. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve never asked, “Why me?” I’ve never felt disappointed in God because of my cancer. This is only true because I spent ten years wrestling with those questions in the 1990s. At that time, I was very disappointed in the God I had been raised with, but that God was created in our own cultural image.

But I digress. I was talking about the cottage wasn’t I?

Mike