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Keeping the mind on what helps me the most is harder and harder to do as the prospect of having to give up the RC effort becomes more of a reality. Click image to enlarge

RC Withdrawals

Rain reduces flying time and magnifies concerns about the future

Text and photo by Tom Hintz

Posted – 10-5-2015

Here in central North Carolina we have enjoyed a nearly unbroken string of flyable weekends thanks in part to a drought spanning most of the summer. Mother Nature recently exacted her revenge in the form of two consecutive rain-filled weekends that kept me away from the activity that is helping me most – flying RC planes.

Usually working on my planes in the shop during the week is both enjoyable and therapeutic. However, being locked in the shop by the rain and having a trouble-filled RC plane build has left me way more stressed than I am used to. I guess the up side to all this is that getting rained out demonstrates just how much the hobby of flying RC planes has been helping me.

Though I have wanted a giant scale warbird for a long time the challenges the ESM 88” Zero combined with a growing concern has wiped out the excitement of getting a new plane ready for flight. These build-related frustrations have more of an impact when combined with my growing uncertainty about the future of my web sites. I feel that this is a crucial time for a consistent flow of content to maintain the growth of my sites but that keeps getting harder to do. The idea is to get the sites to where they are self-sustaining (big traffic) in terms of cash flow but getting them there also requires a cash flow because content just is not free, especially when you provide it free to the public.

Something that keeps floating through my mind is wondering if I am really aware of all of the impacts Alzheimer's and budget-related worries are having on my day to day efforts. The nature of Alzheimer's makes it unlikely that I recall all of the memory-related issues that I have. Laying out a list of content projects is increasingly difficult because there is no longer a budget to support them. That adds another level of filtering I have to apply to content ideas I come up with or that are suggested by an increasingly involved audience of FlyingRC.net. I know of no better way to thwart the growth of a web site than to disregard the good ideas coming from the persons who visit it.

Something that I know is hard for most viewers to understand is the sense of urgency that magnifies all of this. Alzheimer's eventually gets worse, we can be sure of that. The best I can hope for is stalling its progress but that is much harder to focus on when my mind if full of concerns about the future of the site rather than a sense of accomplishment from creating the content the viewers want. There is a growing concern that to keep FlyingRC.net going I may have to sell the very planes that are the tools I use to build traffic and to continue exercising my brain to slow the Alzheimer's.

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