What a week this has been. There were family problems, work problems, thank God there were no church problems. In fact my church has been a great help this week. For the first time in recent memory a church has helped us. Bless them. It was kind of a bell curve, the week started out good, got worse as it went on, then ended as good as it started. My wife and I got to go out to dinner alone for our wedding anniversary, which was very good. I feel I cheated her though, because my mind was still racing a mile a minute from this week.

But today my mind was freed and returned to normal. The best therapy besides prayer for me is aviation. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t get to fly today. It doesn’t matter that I spent the last two months building elevators that I can’t use. What matters is that I was able to spend a few quiet hours at the airport in my hangar working on my plane. It’s dirty and dangerous work. Dangerous to your eyes and fingers anyway. But the cares melted away with my vixen file, my bolts and bearings, my tin snips and clecoes. There is almost a poetry to drilling, deburring, dimpling, priming, and riveting. It somehow restores me. When I do it, I feel normal again. Though it is not normal for most men to build airplanes. But to me it is liberating.

Dreaming is almost as fun as doing. I have almost as much fun planning my flights as I do executing them. Even now I am trying to decide where to go after I have flight tested my elevators. Someplace close like Los Banos, or farther away like Oceano where I can walk onto the beach and watch the waves for a while. In the end it doesn’t really matter because it’s the journey I have come to enjoy much more than the destination.

Here’s to the journey.