Right in the middle of the biggest tournament of the whole year! It was only last Thursday that I dropped an update on the results of the Grupe B brace of “Banzai Runner V” while admitting that I couldn’t quite finish it, and still had 2 heats to run before I could report the final results. Well, if you read my last post, you probably have an idea of why that didn’t happen this weekend, and now I’m out of time: tomorrow morning, I have to begin one of the biggest, most complex, and most high-stakes projects of my career: a “startup” where I am working with a team of 4 of to install nearly $100,000 of new hardware and reconfigure existing hardware on a tight schedule with minimal downtime at a sprawling series of plants scattered across the geography of a whole town, all linked by miles of glassfiber data cable. The project is complex and fraught with potential snags, and if you’ve ever worked a project like that, you know that no matter how many things you think you’ve planned for and worked through before it even happens, there’s always something unexpected to bite you in the ass! We anticipate 12-15 hours of work a day through end of Friday.
My favorite month of the year seems pretty well wiped out already for 2025. The Secret Oktober tournament for this year is likely to remain unfinished: out of necessity, and for the 3rd time in the last 6 years, Drag City Raceway is going dark, and thunderjetheaven.com is going on hiatus for an indeterminate amount of time.
thunderjetheaven.com is a time consuming project. Writing this blog is something I love doing, but between collecting, building, repairing and maintaining hundreds of slot cars, racing them in tournaments, and doing the photography, video, editing, and writing to come up with new and interesting content, I devote many hours each week to keeping the blog going. With pressures at both work and in life building up around me to levels not experienced since my friend Dale passed away in April of 2023, something has to break. The situation I described yesterday, with the sudden loss of my garage and work-space of nearly 20 years, was the straw that finally broke my back. The bottom line is: I simply don’t have the time anymore.
If I really wanted too, I could just lower the quality and throw up any old nonsense; have an AI spit out a bunch of gibberish with some stock photos from time to time and pretend I’m still producing content. Sure, I could do that; but although I can’t say I’ve never been guilty doing just that when time is short, I will never make it a habit, because doing so defeats the purpose. I want you, dear readers, to come here for content that’s worth your time, and to give you that, I need time to produce it. Sadly, this is something I no longer have. Life is just continuing to get more expensive, more stressful, and more difficult all the time. For the next month, every minute of my spare time will be spent out of necessity relocating out of my workshop, which will cut into the time I need for work, where multiple projects all seem to be converging at once; that means making up the time I miss at the office dealing with the move with longer hours when I am there. There is some house maintenance and repairs I’ve been neglecting for too long as well that I need to scramble to remedy before winter hits full force, and then we’re into the holidays, and all the craziness associated with that.
There are only so many hours in the week, and the last few months my insomnia has been worse than ever, partly because I often stay up far too late either racing cars at the track or working on this very blog out of excitement to get a new post out. I knew this couldn’t continue indefinitely, and I’ve now reached the point where I have no choice but to lay the blogging pen down.
As of now, I am not intending to shut it down for good; I will be back…but I can’t say when. Maybe in early December when the dust settles on the situation with the shop shut-down, maybe after X-mas when the holidays are behind us, maybe in January of next year when work hits the slow period before the ramp-up to spring. I wish I could give you an idea, but there are too many unknowns, too many variables, too many things going on right now to know when and how they will end.
I also may-in fact, I likely will-drop a random post here or there in the coming weeks if I have something I just have to impart; you want to see how that “field find” ‘63 T-bird came out, right? The parts have arrived! And I sure owe you another “Modelo En Bofus” post! So don’t be surprised if a new post pops up here or there from time to time over the next couple of months. Even so, I can no longer commit to a schedule: racing tournaments into the sunset, photographing and filming them, then editing it all together with music and a storyline – for the foreseeable future, the bandwidth to do all that just isn’t there.
It’s a sad commentary on life today that I have to cut one of the things I most enjoy out of my schedule. I could bitch and whine about “the state of things” for a paragraph or two, but I won’t: I’ll just get down to business and get things done like I always do.
The Germans have a saying I’ve always admired: „Pflicht geht vor Vergnügen:” “Duty goes before pleasure.” This is a maxim, but its also a necessity. I remain fortunate: I have a job, I have a home, I have money, I have responsibilities, I have people who depend on me and people who love me. That is life. The music, the records, the cartoons, the toys – both @ 1:64 and @ 1:1 – are all great fun, but life requires prioritization. So once again, I quote the introduction of Nexus VI Replicant Roy Batty from one of my favorite films of all time, and I leave you with the hope that, down the road somewhere, there will be “TIME ENOUGH.”
I know it must be hard to keep a positive attitude but I think you are and you’re right about you gotta do what you gotta do when the hits keep on coming. This October has been a bust all around. Just take one thing and one day at a time. Thinking of you!