Oh man, oh man, oh man...

I always admired people who could just order all the materials they needed to build something as complex and material-intensive as a house. It always seemed impossible to me: Even when I made that kind of money, I just turned it over to [the woman formerly known as My Wife] and she dealt with all that stuff.

So when there was talk of my building my own house, among those involved in [the place whose True Name is never spoken] I just laughed it off, because real people, I.E. people like me, didn't do things like that. Of course "real people" do things like that all the time, but they're not people like me. They're people with actual ambition and talent. The fact is, it always just seemed outside the realm of the real, and that's where I always left it.

Much of the material for at least the bones of The Secret Lair comes from salvage, and that was all right with me somehow: Tearing apart things other people had built and building other stuff with it made a lot more sense to me than actually coming up with NEW stuff, because that required resources beyond anything I was used to thinking about. Even back when I was making the money, I never really thought beyond the things I needed to sustain life. Everything other than that was unnecessary luxury, which in turn was in the realm of [the woman formerly known as My Wife]. That was the way she liked it, and truth be told that was the way I liked it, too.

But she's long gone, and this is another world, and The Secret Lair is either going to happen or it isn't. I finally had to face the fact that the salvaged material wouldn't get it done. I finally, despite my numerous procrastinations, had to come up with drawings and figures and none of those showed me anything other than that the salvaged materials I had at hand were not nearly enough to finish the framing for The Secret Lair. Also the calender conspires against me: It's the end of July, I don't have anything but a foundation, and winter won't wait.

So it was clearly necessary to actually BUY something. Which in turn meant it was necessary to come up with a list of things to buy, and I knew in my heart that the list would be genuinely heart-stopping. But by this time I had people standing around waiting for me to do something useful, so there was no turning back. Today I did the deed: I ordered the lumber for the framing, and I'll worry how to make the decisions between paying for it and eating as those worries present themselves. It Must Be Done.

God, this is scary.