here's life

Work has taken a turn for the better.  My constant negativity was pointed out to me by a coworker, so I released my grip on "there has to be a better way" and just was positive about the System.  Now, the little nuances make my life interesting.  No longer do I have to keep up my "new guy/idealist" views, but I can see how all the other people get away with seeing the processes we go through and systems we use as quite helpful and really advanced.  Now, rather than comparing them to an ideal, I can just see how much better it is than if I were using a slide rule. The paradigm shift needed to happen sometime; I was slowly losing my "edge" for foreseeing improvement, and didn't really have any more good ideas.
So, I was enjoying just doing the work. Sure I have to push "Enter", (wait   ) and then "Yes", but amazingly, that makes it search for a drawing and then I can pull it off of a tape drive somewhere and put it on my computer with another click and a few more Yesses!

This evening I went to a Health Fair my company was hosting. I found out that my weight is a little high, but my blood pressure and Cholesterol are good. And I should exercise more, raise my HDL levels, and lower my stress.  I was going to walk a mile to get a tshirt, but I needed to go to a radio control meeting. So, the shirt will have to wait for tomorrow. The RC meeting was good.  We watched a video about the design, testing and flying of SpaceShipOne.  It was amazing what Rutan did with a budget and a short time frame.  They took risks, building a spaceship more quickly and probably better than any government. Previously, manned space flight was limited to three of the largest governments in the world. Rather than spending huge amounts of time and money on wind tunnel tests, they used the Land Shark---strap test sections to a frame on the front of a pickup truck.  Their main engineers didn't look much older than me. Now granted, they were probably brighter than any of the geniuses I knew at college (no offence, guys and gals). But here were people doing what no one had done before---and the thing flew, and came back down in one piece. It used some pretty nifty tricks too---the wings folded on the way down so it would slow down and not burn up.

What does this mean to me?  Will I ever get a job doing amazing things?  Maybe I already have one---since I've been here, we have shipped out over 200 airplanes. Every time I make a fix---unless it doesn't work---that new design will show up on every airplane until 37's are no longer made. Pretty cool, although usually I brush it off as almost worthless because the changes are so small. But even if I did do something amazing---have a huge part in designing the next breakthrough in transportation---it really wouldn't be of value compared to what Bolt and Fjord are doing.  When it is all said and done, the earth and it's works will be burned up---all the composite sky-taxis, all the tin-cans-with-engines will be ashes in the wind---but the people who come to know Jesus because of what you or I do, they will last. "Well done" will be more fulfilling than all the people's accolades for flying higher, faster, farther, or building some combination of cloth and glue that does what no one has done before.