“What fresh hell will be vis­ited upon us today … ” Lisa asked as we mud­dled our way through the morn­ing after I lost the bat­tle to keep the trailer plumb­ing work­ing. The bit­ter cold that’s not sup­posed to hap­pen in Port­land had finally worked its way past all my attempts to keep it at bay. Nei­ther our build­ing sched­ule nor our 5th wheel trailer were pre­pared for the pas­sage into this kind of win­ter. OK, how do we do this with­out water?

The sum­mer spent dig­ging through the lay­ers of his­tory, dis­man­tling and cast­ing aside the bro­ken parts to begin the restora­tion and improve­ment of our lit­tle house is now run­ning head­long into the rig­ors of 20 degree weather and the rapid pas­sage of pre­cious time. If a def­i­n­i­tion of learn­ing is — make a mis­take, size up the result and then decide whether you can live with it or need to tear it apart and redo it, then I should be ready to defend my dis­ser­ta­tion some­time next sum­mer. It’s just a ques­tion of whether it will be in arche­ol­ogy, tem­po­rary weather abate­ment prac­tices or liv­ing in impos­si­bly small spaces while wor­ry­ing about being unemployed.

Or per­haps my rela­tion­ship with this blog will be key to the learn­ing expe­ri­ence. It started as a means to flex­i­bly expand upon my web­site that is presently stuck in html grid­lock. I thought it would be a way to explore the idea embod­ied in the title I gave it — Métier.  That won­der­ful French word for which one def­i­n­i­tion is “Work or activ­ity for which a per­son is par­tic­u­larly suited” seemed to sum up a lot of the ques­tion that seems to pre­oc­cupy mine leisure thoughts - what the heck am I suited for? But the pre­ma­ture end of work in the shop and the big hole that left in my sched­ule made it seem the time was ripe for remod­el­ling the house. We had been think­ing about it for years. So why not just start post­ing to the blog about the house project as well?

What I didn’t count on was the rav­en­ous beast the house project would turn into. It’s easy enough to play the philo­soph­i­cal card and just imag­ine how great it will be that about a third (maybe a half?, two thirds?) of the house will actu­ally be new when we are done with it. But the tran­si­tion from mild despair to grudg­ing accep­tance of the inevitable even­tu­ally left me feel­ing appre­hen­sive about lay­ing the whole mess out on the table to fully exam­ine it. Then add to that my sense of WTF? when I dis­cov­ered that in my attempt to elim­i­nate the scourge of bogus users reg­is­ter­ing on the blog I had also elim­i­nated Lisa and all of her posts. Blog­ger paralysis .…

So, with with this Decem­ber entry on a morn­ing when it is pos­si­bly too cold for a mere Port­land res­i­dent raised in Texas to do any­thing out­side, I throw down the gaunt­let and chal­lenge myself to live the fully exam­ined life. Blog on … and put that gaunt­let back on — it’s cold!

I thus con­tinue by fol­low­ing up this post with Lisa’s now belated last post that more fully informs the com­ment that begins this post.