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| August 1, 2017 |
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Ignoring
Clint Eastwood's advice in "Dirty Harry" that
opinions, like certain body parts, are best kept to
yourself.
 My
wife turns 74 this month, and I'll follow her in December.
Funny, when she ups her age every August, I up mine as well,
4 months early. I just seem a year older, somehow. Lately,
I've been thinking about shedding some of my routine, taking
life a little easier, not quitting completely, but maybe
trimming things that don't matter as much anymore, to me and
to others I am in contact with.
I've been running
my aviation website now for over 20 years, and those "global
air links" I create almost every day have been
taking huge amounts of time for a dozen or more years.
Lately, I've come to realize that, while I enjoy finding the
information and putting the graphics together, I'm not sure
anyone else, other than me, cares one way or the other.
I
get a monthly detailed report on my website activity, what
pages viewers go to, how many visitors on a daily basis, and
I've learned that not that many people click open my "previous
articles" section. I have a standing offer on my
website to share those links with others for their websites,
but other than a couple of friends in the aviation business
who politely took the offer, nobody else has, and the
reality that I'm never going to get back those thousands of
hours doing them is sinking in. Will I continue with "global
air links"? Maybe, maybe not, I'm thinking about it.
A
year or two ago, realizing that I was no longer doing a good
job brokering airplanes, I quit that part of the business
and focused on lining up pilots to deliver planes that
others sold. That turned out to be, I think, a good
decision. And, in a moment of total honesty, I wondered if I
actually ever did a really good job at brokering planes, and
for that matter, maybe I wasn't all that hot in my 35 years
in banking. I can think of many I know who were much better
in both fields of endevour than I ever was.
I still
do the websites for three aviation brokers, and enjoy doing
them, it doesn't take too many hours a month, and I do
devote a fair amount of time finding pilots to deliver
planes for new buyers, something I do well, I think, and
these activities provide me with a little "walking
around money".
Hazel and I have been RVing
for several years, going full-time in 2015, getting rid of
about 98% of everything we owned, including the house. I've
really enjoyed our travels, recording our adventures with
stories and photos on a
travel
blog, so, as I thought, our friends and family,
especially our children, could see what we were up to.
But,
as with my aviation website, when it comes to checking the
viewer numbers on the travel blog, I'm my own biggest fan.
Whenever I update the blog with some story like getting our
satellite television system up and running, I think it will
be interesting to others, it sure is to me. Checking the
reports, however, about half of those friends and family who
politely signed up to receive updates don't bother to click
them open.
So, why am I doing what I'm doing? All
of it now seems to be a big waste of time, better spent
enjoying retirement and travel in our motorhome, leaving the
kids to wonder where the heck mom and dad are. And, that
itself is a big assumption, they might not even care.
So,
will I continue to do the travel blog? Probably, but it will
be for my biggest fan, me. I enjoy going back and reading
about the trips I've taken, and it is always a reminder
about how time flies.
In the old days in Alaska,
the Eskimos, when mom and dad got too old to be useful or
interesting, the kids would put them on an ice floe and
float them out to sea. Who knows, this might get popular
again.
Global
Air Aviation Referral Service
I welcome
responses, and will be glad to post them here. Email your
remarks to
ron@global-air.com |
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