Dropping the Toast

I don't know if it's true or not, but conventional wisdom has it that a slice of buttered toast, if dropped, will invariably land butter-side down. I can see the appeal of such a belief to the pessimistic crowd - the planets are aligned against me, anything bad that can happen will happen, and it's just the way of our universe and has nothing to do with any kind of personal curse that may have earned by flipping off a witch-like old hag puttering along in the fast lane at 42 mph. You know, as in "it could happen to anybody."

So, it must have been right around 3:00 am last night when I popped awake with an idea. Now sometimes this happens and it's actually a good idea, but more often than not it's a realization that something I thought was bad actually might be even worse. In this case it had to do with the mispainted fuselage side skin. My belief was that I had mislabeled the side skin as the right side instead of the left and simply failed to not trust myself. That belief was helpful because it meant that I wouldn't have to drill out the 20 rivets that I had just used to install 10 nutplates on the supposed "real" right skin. Why, if it turned out that the labeling had been correct in the first place, that meant that those rivets would have to be drilled out. That's not a real big deal, although it would mean ordering 20 replacement rivets from Van's, which would be yet another of those $2.25 for a few ounces of rivets shipped for $12.95. That would certainly be a butter-side down eventuality.

I didn't sleep well after that. The inexorably slow clock finally worked its way around to 5:00 am, the earliest time I will allow myself to get up and go to work. There would be a stop at the hangar on the way, but I already knew exactly what I would find when I got there.

I'll be ordering rivets today.

On the bright side, such as it is, at least I didn't spend a lot of time removing all of the paint from the skin that now turns out to be the one correctly oriented.