We hired another doctor. Her old clinic was lying to her patients and telling them she'd quit to "spend time with her family" because she insisted that the clinic needed to inform people about the importance of vaccines instead of parroting the Infowars line about Precious Bodily Fluids. So we bought a $4k VFC fridge and I put her name up in lights a foot high in front of 50,000 cars a day. Meanwhile our newer midwife just bought a house. Job creation? I HAZ IT.

My watch begins tonight. Getting on a plane at a new airport that I could literally bike to. It opened three months ago. It's at capacity now. It's been weird seeing passenger traffic overhead; this place was a sleepy boring-ass suburb but now we've got a convention center and an airport and in three years we'll have a damn Metro.

What I've done in the past is buy a one-way down because I don't really know when I'm coming back. This time I bought a round-trip that brings me back in late September when the show is over. It was so much cheaper that way even if I eat the return ticket. Psychologically it's put me in a place of "going on a long journey" instead of "vanishing forever from my home." It still sucks but it doesn't suck abysmally. I remind myself constantly that I'm not deploying overseas or heading out for an offshore drilling rig. I'm flying back often enough that dairy products don't spoil.

School collapsed in an impressive way this quarter. I bailed on the last of my jewelry class because the teacher was insulting to the kind of work I wanted to do and was teaching me nothing. I basically dared her to give me an F because she has no power over me but I did it in such a way that somehow we're still friends. I suspect her behavior is related to Alzheimer's or dementia. Meanwhile my CNC program might be collapsing. Their attendance is at about 40% of where it needs to be to be sustainable. Really, school is collapsing in an impressive way everywhere we look. My wife's school basically lost an entire department over the past few weeks. And the place I have my jewelry program? They can't make money selling pizza to college kids so they closed the kitchen. I'm legitimately worried about the future of secondary education in the United States; something big is going to have to shift to counter the mountain of bullshit that's accumulated over the past couple decades. I mean, I hear of constant abuse from the students I know and my school figured they could just up and move a final without any notification. Shit like that didn't happen back in the '90s.

But I'm good. I've got a half-dozen watches finished and one on Chrono24. All my tools work and I know how to use all of them. I'm at the place where when I can't diagnose the problem, neither can anyone else and generally the advice I get is "buy a more expensive tool." I'm in a great spot to do my own learning on my own schedule with my own focus. In retrospect, my past journey has been about justifying the time I'm not working. Now that I've seen all there is to see as far as what I want to do I'm comfortable doing it on my own terms. I straightened a hairspring on the FrankenSenna and determined that the movement was garbaged but the balance is now awesome. Of the three jewels I can see, one of them has a piece of lint wrapped around the pivot such that I'm pretty sure the other 22 are in a questionable state of cleanliness. And while there will be a time when I want to rebuild a 7750 that time is not now.

I started off not knowing where the journey would end. I still don't. But I know that I'm now qualified to make all the decisions I need to make. And that was probably worth $28k and 60 credits.