The Meeting

13-16 Nov. 2017

I had a handbook meeting all week in Wichita, leaving Heather to enjoy all the best that civilization has to offer, like unlimited hot running water and Cinnabons, not to mention a car to get between them. I figure people either don't know about these meetings only because they don't care (fair enough), or they do already know what these meetings are about and they certainly don't need to hear it again. We're in the middle of an awkward phase where there is a lot of sausage making going on but from the outside it doesn't seem like a lot is happening. The primary thing going on now is we're expanding the composites content to fully cover structural adhesive bonding, which is a very efficient way of building complex aerospace structures. I can just sense a lot of folks slowly losing consciousness reading that last sentence, but hey, somebody has to do it.

It was great to see folks from the handbook again and I think we covered a lot of ground. The most important thing to me is before we left I had finished my homework so I don't have that hanging over me. I had a few sections I was committed to write and the initial draft is always the most painful for me. We had meetings and talked and went out to dinner and talked some more, much of which sounds like a foreign language to an outsider, sprinkled with some familiar terms that you slowly come to realize don't mean the same thing to us. I no longer fit the meeting attendance model well because I no longer have an employer and am not anxious to acquire another.

After dinner on Thursday we pointed ourselves down the road to Oklahoma City to get a head start on the next long leg of our holiday travel. We've adopted the approach of if we're going to get back in the car anyway we might as well knock off an hour or two getting a little farther down the road. This helps make up some for our not so early starting times and still get in 600 to 700 miles on a travel day.

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