Of Mice and Men

If I may quote poet Robert Burns poem "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough":

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

And why would I want to quote that? Quite simple: because it has been one of those days that your mother warned you about. In my line of work it is not uncommon to arrive at the office brimming with energy and armed with a plan only to find that events transpire against getting any of the day's goals started, much less completed. Today was such a day at the paying job. An application that I had released to production wouldn't run, a different application that I routinely run on Wednesdays to generate a collection of financial reports would run but suddenly decided that it would fail at the point of saving the generated spreadsheets, and one of my legacy Java applications decided to play the fool when a user canceled the opening of a help ticket. Two of those ultimately turned out to be my fault, and the third was the result of a user changing the name of a shared network folder without telling me. With the latter two thirds of the day taken up with meetings, those three problems put paid to the idea of getting anything productive done in the morning.

All in all, it was very frustrating. I'm beginning to realize that there is nothing like returning from a vacation to make you start pining for a vacation.

Usually I can count on the RV-12 project as a good palette cleanser after a day like that, but today wasn't one of those days. The plan was simple. Cadillac Pete would join me in the hangar to help rearrange the placement of the fuselage now that the RV-6 has been moved to a different hangar, then we would install the control rods that I've been working on. The moving of the fuselage was simple enough, but I was stopped in my tracks when I went to start the installation of the control rods. Just look at the state of my flap handle!

EGAD!! RUST!!

I had mistakenly thought that I wouldn't need to paint the part of the flap handle that would be protected down inside the tunnel; that was clearly a case of naivete bordering on stupid. The only thing to do was remove the flap handle and clean off the rust before applying a protective coat of paint, but despite the obvious need it still took some time to talk myself into it. I couldn't help remembering how hard it had been to get that darn thing in there in the first place. Self discipline won out in the end, so out came the flap handle. It is currently sitting in the hangar with a fresh coat of paint hardening on it.

That's pretty much all of the airplane work I'll be doing next week. I'll try to re-install the flap handle tomorrow night, but I have to set aside enough time to give the hangar a nice cleaning and straightening up in preparation for my EAA Chapter 9 hangar visit scheduled for Saturday morning.