Turning Around At The Summit

  I'm in a sort of odd place.  AnnaMarie picked up on it and asked if anything was wrong.  There's a lot wrong, but there's a lot right, too. 
  Remember in Chariots Of Fire after he (spoiler alert) won?  It's kind of like that.  Now, I know many, many people have built houses, there's nothing history-making about it.  But I just finished a four year project.  I pulled out of AnnaMarie what her idea of the perfect cottage was.  I went ot sleep thinking about how to accomplish the next task, balanced overtime at work so I could fund the project without debt, channelled resources, worked quite a few 16 hour days. 
   Now it's done.
   Towards the end it was a real struggle to push through the last bit but I had to finish by November 13th---it marked 3 years from the time they issued the building permit.  I was swearing this is the last major building project---I'd never go through all this again.
   Did I say that last time too?  I do remember feeling like this when the cabin was completed back in 2003.  It was cured by the Cedar Fire ripping through our neighborhood; the sense of relief of having both our homes spared when most of those around us burned up put an end to foolish melancholy.  I'd be OK with skipping that this time around though.
    There's a big hole now in my time.  Every spare moment was spent doing something towards getting the cottage built.  Sure, there's tons of stuff needing attention now, and without a built in excuse I have to attend to them.
    I'm going to miss the logistics and planning.  I'm going to miss the feeling of looking at what got accomplished by days' end.  I'm going to miss time spent building with the occaisonal helpers----Mike, Jim, especially Byron.  Most of all I'm going to miss putting decisions in front of AnnaMarie, thrying to explain options without influencing her choices, then showing her the finished product.  Things are turned around now that she's doing decorating---I get to see what she's created.
   We've spent the night there once.  Awesome.  We were supposed to have date night in a Temecula hotel tomorrow too but we both decided we'd rather be at her cottage, so we're doing that instead.  She really made my day while I was in DC---she wasn't feeling well and I couldn't be there.  She made her way to the bedroom at her cottage and crawled into bed there. 
    I was in a meeting that went well past my 10 minute attention span.  I caught myself sketching ideas for house plans....