I feel like I'm in a long checkout line at the grocery store

Have you ever gotten in the back of a short line at the grocery store and found that the people ahead of you had complicated orders? One word of advice: Don't ever follow me in line at the grocery store - I always pick the wrong one. In other parts of my goofy life, I generally can be counted on to take the long way around to accomplish the simplest of things, like building a barn then enclosing a space to serve as my sanctum sanctorum, choosing the wrong paint color (I'm doing it over myself to avoid the embarrassment of admitting to the painter that I screwed up). 

Malcolm and Jon are the right people to be working on an airplane restoration and they're working away on the CallAir Cadet - I telephone every week to see if they're still working on the same thing as last week (sometimes they are). I can't wait to see this airplane together, on the landing gear, painted, with an engine in place and ready for its first test run. If it weren't for the owner (me, of course) deciding to do a full restoration, the airplane could have been recovered, looking pretty ok, a long time ago. But nooooooo. Here we are  midway in the third year of the project, a glimmer of light at the end of a long tunnel but still nowhere near finished.

In any other circumstance, I'd just jump in and take an active hand, but this isn't the right circumstance. To be blunt, I don't know anything about how to restore an airplane and it's too far along in the right hands to do that ... I'd only be interfering.

So while I wait to get back in the saddle, I thought I'd share another Air&Space/Smithsonian article of mine from 1993:

Let's just hope the lady with all those coupons ahead of me in the grocery line has them organized. Wait. Wait. Arggghhhh!