When my mind is fully engaged, it’s a bit like a NASCAR race--always more than one idea racing along, sometimes bumping into another resulting in a crazy spectacle. All the ideas are headed in the same general direction, but it is hard to tell which one will win at the beginning of the race. I believe in putting a lot of cars on the track and letting attrition weed out the weak ones. Experience and skill slowly moves the best idea to the front of the pack, and 500 miles later, I have a winner. 
I love to be fully engaged in a project: the smell of gears smoking in my brain, the flash of new ideas to explore. Last week, I found it necessary to become fully engaged with the cancellation of the GIS program at Olds College. Extreme disappointment and depression would soon fill the void left in my head by the departure of our program if I did not engage in some other activity. An idle mind is a dangerous thing (a saying never truer than with me)!
So I need an activity to engage in. As luck would have it, I also have an airplane I need to get built—the one we will use in Bolivia to gather mapping data. Before I build it, however, I also need to design it. Before I design it, I need to know components I will use. I know that this may appear to be backwards thinking, but I like to start with the outcome and work in reverse so that each part of the design meets the requirements of the final product. In the case of my plane, I started with the motor and prop. Making the best choice involves recording thrust, watts, amps, and volts for one of many motor/prop combinations on a test stand.
As I started testing with Murray one Saturday morning, it occurred to me that I had seen these numbers before and that the idea-car moving to the front of the pack looked awfully familiar. I began wondering why I bought 6-cell speed controls and such. I suddenly realized I had done this all before! I knew which idea was going to win this race because I had seen this race last year. I just didn’t write down the results!
Some might say that I wasted a Saturday morning doing these tests over again. I prefer to think of it as spending quality time with a friend and confirming previous results. Of course, if I had written the results down last time I could have spent that Saturday morning designing instead of testing. Murray wrote the results down this time so we won’t have to do this again.
I am well on my way to finishing the plane—thanks to Murray for help testing and my daughter for help cutting wings. I hope to have the plane built by the 14th and test flights run by the 21st. That gives me a whole week before I get on the airline to Bolivia! Uh oh! How am I ever going to fill the time?
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