Perry L. Gardner: Private Journal #27
Tuesday, February 27, 1990
Greece was a long time ago, and here it is late February. This is been a strange winter—record-breaking cold in December, and the last two nights, with a long mild January and February in between. Temperature for last two nights was 9-10°F, but it is up over 30° already in only a couple of hours.
Many times I have been thinking of things I should write in my journal, but in such bits and fragments that they don’t overcome the inertia. Greece was a high, but we were glad to come home. Much has happened since then, including a real downer. The PSA tests kept showing an elevating reading on the prostate cancer, and the Doctor got a consulting opinion from a specialist at Stony Brook.
The recommendation was hormone therapy to cut the testosterone level and slow down the cancer-feeding stimulus. We were given three options—shots at $300/month, pills with heart-trouble side effects—or a bi-lateral orchectomy, which entailed a hospital stay of two nights. Well, we took the latter, and I feel much improved. The only side effects have been hot flashes. The Doctor says the cancer is inoperable, which is a disconcerting situation, but hopefully the hormone treatment can slow things down to allow years of quality time—we shall see.
My life is getting back to normal after this crisis. I’m doing more, and feeling like doing more. I’m getting back in action at the UUFH and looking forward to the same here at home. But I’m still spinning my wheels. I would really like to get my room cleaned up—the clutter is distracting. I can’t bring myself to throw things out without checking them first, and most stuff is still not approved to go, so it stays, without sufficient organized storage space.
A survey showed over 27 different magazines on the floor. I’ll never read them all, so why do I save them? A few I like to go back to from time to time, but most get skimmed through when they first come in (if they don’t just get put in a to-be-reviewed pile), and that is it—they just pile up. Well, at least I’m working on the problem—I have admitted that I will never go back and read them all. I suppose some I save for archival purposes, but since I don’t have an archive plan, this may be a waste of space.
The one area where I have gotten a large amount of pleasure is in my old collection of model airplane magazines. How long this will last, I don’t know, but right now we’re airplanes are definitely a major interest. Since I won’t be here 50 years from now, current magazines don’t have the same potential for future perusing with such intense interest. My interest in boating has diminished somewhat, so those magazines are of less interest. The political scene is changing, and only the current news is of interest. I’m not about to document a political/historical account. Many magazines are saved because of geographical interest, or just pretty nature pictures for an artist archive. So there you have it—a problem to be worked on.
The interest in models began with the Ship Model Society, but the airplanes have diverted much of my interest. One book on aviation led to another, and I guess I’ve read most of those that interest me in the library. My major interest is in aviation between WWI and WWII, although I also have interest in post-war stuff that I had some relation to. I’ve got a pretty good historical and technical grasp of the aviation history out of several excellent books I’ve read. I guess this is all part of my memoirs—Just in my lifetime, most of the history of aviation has unfolded, and even though I was part of it, I didn’t know about a lot of what was going on. But now I feel I do know much more and have a lifetime context to put it in. If you say the time before 1920 in aviation was witnessed by my father, then the whole real history has been in these two generations.
Somehow going through all this makes me feel a bit obsolete in my technical training—when I was growing up and in my career, aviation was the frontier. It no longer is, and I’m not sure where the frontier is today—probably electronics, but I’m not handy with that subject.
Yesterday, I washed the plastic on the new airplane kits I bought, as you are advised to do, to remove the molding oils/wax so paint will stick. My reading makes me aware of historical aircraft, and then when I find kits of those airplanes, I like to buy them—I have the start of a mini-museum—all I have to do is put the kits together.
Interface: A Topic for a Point of View
I have been an Interface Engineer. It is akin to architecture in that it looks at the whole project, with the focus that all is a sum of the discrete parts, and that all the parts have to fit together physically and functionally at what I am calling the Interface.
I first ran into the term formally on the LM Project, where I was appointed Interface Manager before I was Configuration Manager. The LM had many interfaces, large and small. It had to fit in the Saturn, it had to match the Command Module so they could dock together, it had to fit with the crew, not to mention test vehicles and electronics that I have forgotten.
This was probably an outgrowth of my experience as Vehicle Design Integrator on the LEM Proposal, where I was concerned again with interfaces. So from this and more, I have reached a way of looking at things in terms of interfaces, and it is a very broadening perspective, because one thing leads to another ad infinitum.