I said, in another message recently, that I haven't had time
to work on my cars during the past two months.
I lied.
This morning, for instance, I got up at 6 AM. Turned on
the computer, shuffled into fuzzy slippers and sweats, and
set about redoing the first four chapters of my current book.
Got four or five new pages written on the basic structure of
Chapter 8, too; it's going to be about animation instead
of what I thought it would be about, a discussion of APIs
in the multimedia authoring systems I was planning to
use when I did the outline ten months ago (none of which
are actually in the book as it stands now).
Came into work around 10, finished the MediaWrangler
User's Guide that Kim and I spent all weekend working on.
I got that done by noon, then it was time for a software
meeting on the Avistar products. Made a to-do list for the
rest of the week, then ran off to a sushi restaurant that's
going to be this week's restaurant review.
And every bit of that was working on my car.
Why? In a month or two, I'm going to go into some paint
shop and tell the owner what I want done. He (it'll almost
certainly be a he, but I'd be just as happy going to a woman-
owned paint and body shop if you happen to know of one!)
will tell me how much it'll cost. It'll either be within my
budget or not, and if it is I'll shake his hand and write him
a check, drawn on a bank account filled up by the work I'm
doing today, and next week, and next month.
Like probably many of you, I used to sniff at "checkbook
restorations." I sneered at how much those people missed by
not getting into the car themselves, getting dirty and scraped,
leaving brown spots of dried blood on the sharp edges of the
metal in the engine bay. I wondered how such people could
ever feel the car was really theirs without working on it.
Today, I realized that I have been working on my car all
the time. Every word I type about how to build interactive
presentations is a 5/16-24 fine thread nut or bolt in the
restored engine bay. Every video sequence I copy to disk
and use in an example is a session tuning my SU carbs.
Every time I move the mouse, I'm really buffing out the
new paint or wiping up a trickle of oil from the dashpots.
True, the actions are being performed indirectly. Some
other hand will turn the wrench, some other eye will
check the fit, some other foot will blip the throttle to check
out the way it's tuned before giving it back to me.
So anybody who doesn't think I worked at least as hard
on the project as when I would lay under the engine and let
hot oil seep into my scalp is suffering from self-deception.
In some ways, what I've been doing is harder than getting
under the car and wrenching on it: I haven't had the close
contact with the car to remind me of what I'm working for.
There are more than one way to work on a car. Some of us
do it with wrenches, and some of us do it with a keyboard
and a camcorder. I'm just happy that I know how to do both.
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