Life update
February 27, 2008 - Thursday
So much has changed since that rather bleak last post. I am half a year older (46), and my life has gone completely around since then. My divorce is done, at least we are now down to just paperwork at the courthouse, the kids and I are getting a nice new apartment tomorrow, and money is not an issue for the first time in my adult life. I am still working at the air museum and I love it. Kids are doing GREAT and we are all happy and healthy. My ex-wife has “decided to be brave and start dating - using eHarmony.” _Thank_God_. Less effort she’ll have to mess with MY life! Yippeeee J
My friends and I still get together on Wednesdays - two hours of yapping with old aviators. I am the youngest in the group by a wide margin and strangely, I am considered “one of the Germans”, because I do know a bit about the Luftwaffe. By far, more of my friends are American fighter and bomber pilots, but I have three German fighter pilot friends so within the group, when we all break up into groups, I am invariably left to struggle along with my High School German in the midst of five native speakers. If nothing else, its great practice. We also have the only Russian in the “Old Bold Pilots” - Yuri was an airshow and heavy transport pilot for the Soviet Union and we actually met once in 1988; now twenty years later, his nation has gone out of business and he is left to latch on to our table - another oddball that has become “one of the Germans”. We drink more alchohol than the other flyers, and Yuri makes sure its always Wodka.
Otherwise, my life is evenly distributed between the air museum and raising my kids. They love the museum too and work as shills during the vacation months - we have a flight simulation “war room” where up to 8 people can sit at computers and fight all comers. Its common to have the chatter of machineguns and folks yelling at each other and its quite fun. Visitors to the museum hesitantly peer into the flight simulation room and it’s a bit intimidating at first, but then they see my darling little daughter and book-ish son playing at the computers and it instantly puts them at ease. “How hard could it be?” In no time, my little babes are in among the visitors, guns blazing. Jenna is only seven, but that is seven years of watching me play flight sims, explaining tactics, showing her how to maneuver a fighter and disengage from combat at will. She is adept at it, and visitors, including hard-core gamers, are amazed at the ease with which she appears on their tails and blows them out of the sky.
More later, time to play with our kitty, Ginger. If I wear her out now, she MIGHT let me sleep tonight!