Well, you're ahead of me. I've thought about SCUBA but my ears won't take it. I love to snorkel but even then about 20 feet is absolute max for my ears. I always had trouble in airplanes too! Had to constantly 'clear' on the way down by holding my nose and blowing.

So for now, guess I'll just stick to the surface.

I guess I'm lucky. Once I learned the trick I've been able to keep my ears clear without even having to swallow ... but if I forget and an ear plugs up then sometimes even swallowing doesn't fix the problem.

I must have misunderstood you because you can't have been snorkeling at 20 feet, can you? (Unless you're a WW2 German submarine. :D) Surely you meant that you cant free dive (and therefore can't scuba) past 20 feet, ja mein kapitan?

Well.....you CAN dive with a snorkel; you just have to remember to take a deep breath first!! And then.....don't try and take another breath with the top of the snorkel below the surface! Even the ones with the little stopper ball I wouldn't trust under water. But I usually limited my dives to ten feet or so.

But I did a lot of diving with a snorkel in Grand Cayman Island. One of the best places to not only snorkel, but perhaps the best SCUBA in the World. You can see forever under water there it is so clear.

Your wrote of clear water. Get this, skylab ...

Our learning scuba diving was to fulfill a childhood amition of my wife's. Part of her dream was to do it somewhere in the Caribbean, preferably in Barbados. Now ...

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My wife is a trouper, the hardest working and least complaining person I have ever known. (At age 64 she has just completed a difficult BSN college program, that on top of the MBA she earned ten years ago, all of this while working for a living.) Today a nurse after decades of high tech stuff, when a winter storm comes and other people start calling in "snow", she's the one who spends the night in the cafeteria so her patients, and the patients of the supposedly-snowbound nurses, will continue to get the right care from her. (She's done this a dozen times since starting her new career.)

I mention these things because she's been working for a living since she was nine, when she started her own paid professional babysitting business. Such dedication is not a new thing for her.

She lived in a fairly large building at the corner of 12th Street and 8th Avenue in NYC, one with perhaps 100 apartments. In fairly short order she had a thriving business going, at first mostly from that building but soon from others in the neighborhood as well ... And she saved every penny she earned, enough money that when her parents decided to take themselves and their three daughters to Barbados for a first-ever family vacation, my wife paid her own way. (Which was important to her because her parents were always on tight finances and she didn't want to be a burden on them.)

To this day she talks excitedly about that trip, and about the long puddle jumper flight that must have been in one of your DC-6s. (I made this guess about the equipment after interviewing her about various aspects of the shape of the aircraft's wings and tail. I had to do this because my wife has zero knowledge of aviation and a below zero interest in it.) So when an opportunity arose for us to take a break from our lucrative but unbelievably high pressure consulting business she said "Let's go to Barbados and learn to scuba dive."

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Well, she'd already been to Barbados, knew the place, loved it and wanted to go back. In contrast, my having traveled extensively in Europe every three months for two years, in spite of my speaking French, German and a little Dutch, and some Spanish, and a few words of Danish and Norwegian, so that I was able to integrate nicely with local cultures, I had come to appreciate our collective national lifestyle and amenities.

(Folks outside the USA, I mean no offence. But as the Bruce Sprinsteen song goes, I was Born In The USA. If you come here to visit you will soon understand what that phrase means, and you just may not want to leave. Whenever spare time permitted, I spent as much time as I could on side trips, visiting places where tourists don't go. But Europe ain't home for me. So ...)

"No", I said. "I don't want to go to Barbados. Let's go to Key West instead because it will have all the advantages of the Caribbean while still being part of the USA, with all that will mean in terms of facilities, sanitation, safety and the like".

So that's what we did. We didn't fly to Key West, instead we did one of my famous non-stop long distance drives, this time from Colorado Springs to Key West by way of the Cherokee Strip, Anadarko, Arkansas, Texarkana, Baton Rouge, and on to Florida via the Gulf Coast. (If memory serves it only took us a day and a half, maybe two, to get to Key West. (I drive 20 hours per day.) We filled the time playing a Rhino Records huge set of oldies released on the then-new-fangled CDs.)

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And so it was that we came to be in Key West. My wife confirmed that the beaches and the shallow drop of the ocean floor, and the coral reefs, and the brilliantly colored fish, were just like Barbados. So there we were vacationing in a tropical paradise, just ninety miles from Cuba, which reminds me of another story. (D**n. I love telling stories.) ...

While my mother was born and raised in the Bronx, her parents were well to do for a while (till the crash of 29) and they split their time between their posh apartment on the Grand Concourse and their small villa outside San Juan.

So my mother grew up in that second culture too, developing a deep interest in Latino music, the genes for which she passed on to me. :) She also taught my wife how to make a killer pallela, which we still eat today as often as I can persuade her to endure the lengthy preparation that this dish requires. (Rice, chicken, seafood, spices and beer seasoning are the principle ingredients.)

The odd thing is, even though my mother played piano quite well, she never repeat never played the music of her childhood days in PR. I never asked why, in the way of kids simply accepting that this was the how the world -- her world -- worked. Perhaps she was incapable of improvisation. Perhaps she didn't really understand Afro-Cuban song structure. Perhaps she felt that without a real band with brasses the music would not sound right. I simply don't know.

All I know is that when my father wasn't around she would tune the nice Grundig radio in the living room to one of the several stations in Manhattan that would play this kind of music at least part time. Sometimes I would get out my guitar and play along. Sometimes I would noodle on the piano. But mostly I just listened, tapping my fingers as percussion accompaniment while I did homework. (Shades of high school with my friend McFarlane Mackey and his love of African drumming.)

Earlier I mentioned our high pressure consulting business ...

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We didn't plan it. It was simply that an old boss of my wife's in a computer software consulting business in Colorado Springs had left that company and gone to work in NYC as a technical group manager at Integrated Resources in NYC and wanted some help, initially from just my wife but later from both of us.

Integrated Resources later failed after an IRS crackdown on abusive limited partner tax shelter schemes. However, until the IRS got involved, Integrated did a high volume business forming, selling and managing partnerships in Oil & Gas, aircraft leasing, rolling stock leasing, blah blah blah. Each partnership had members counted in the dozens or hundreds, and memberships could be bought and sold.

So it was an intensely computer based business and my wife and I both are/were programmers -- good ones. (I still am, and I still practice the art.) She specialized in mainframe banking and brokerage software, exactly the skill set that Integrated needed. I specialized in personal computer technical software, another thing they needed.

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And so it came to pass that we were spending a lot of time in Manhattan. At first we lived part time in a run-down hotel on 45th street, a place where a lot of traveling bands from Europe stayed. (I still could not get away from the music business!) But we reached a point where renting an apartment would be more economical.

So there we were with an apartment in Manhattan. And a house in the Springs. And the Golden Midi studio in an apartment in Denver, from which I was also doing occasional Denver-based software consulting. Our life became very complex very quickly and for almost 1.5 years we commuted between Manhattan and the Springs, spending Saturdays at home, Sundays in Denver and the rest of the week in NYC.

(Our weekly rhythm of life became a ritual. At 4PM on Friday, down tools and take a cab to EWR. Take a particular scheduled Continental flight to DEN, saying hello to the gate people, and to those members of the cabin and flight deck crew that we happened to know to say hello to. Drive to the Springs. Then drive back to Denver on Sunday morning. Then at 4PM on Sunday, take a particular Continental flight to LGA followed by a cab to 49th Street. Then go to bed, getting up at 6AM to start another week of the cycle.)

Or rather, it was my wife who made this trek every week. I did it on and off, basing myself at whichever end of the system placed the most demands me but spending as much as I could hands-on in our apartment/studio in downtown Denver.

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When our overhead hit $25,000 per month I said to my wife "So this is what success feels like", meaning that we were slaves to the obligations we had picked up along the way. I am not kidding, skylab, there was one month when we grossed $50,000 in NYC billings. We had been required by the needs of Integrated's business to work 18x7 that month -- both of us -- and the money simply came pouring in.

It couldn't last. Integrated eventually got nailed by the IRS, the partnership marketing operation collapsed, the company went bankrupt, and most of the consultants were left holding the bag in terms of uncollected billings.

Not us. I saw the end coming and put collections from Integrated on a very short leash. So when the company folded we only had to write off a few thousand dollars. We exited the NYC consulting scene with about $200,000 in the bank, proceeding to lose it all in the graphics/printing business we then started after closing Golden Midi.

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It was a very interesting experience. It taught us exactly what Mae West meant when she said "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better." She didn't mean it as a joke, she meant that money doesn't really matter, and I came to learn that she was exactly right though it took a bankruptcy to really drive the lesson home.

What I have come to realize is that material possessions are not important. The only important things are family, friends, pets and photos, in that order. In certain circumstances the courts can and will strip you of everything you thought you had "owned", but in the USA they can't take your family or your friends from you, and in this country you are allowed to make a fresh start.

So the things that have no monetary value are the most important things of all. They cannot be replaced no matter how much money you have.

I came to realize that life is like that -- truly a rat race -- for a lot of "successful" people. If all you care about is making and spending money, and if luck (it was luck) favors you as it did us, such an approach to making a living can be very nice. But for all too many "successful" professional people, the lifestyle is a living hell.

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I don't want to name names but a cerain person I know had been slated to become a junior VP at a major corporation based here in Denver. Came the .com bust and the company went with it, taking away not only this person's JVP opportunity but also his very job -- his high paying job. Today that person is still bitter and angry because, at the top, he had come to believe that this was the way life was supposed to be. But through no fault of his own -- through the vagaries of the local economy -- through the luck of the draw -- he has not been able to recreate even a high paying job much less the formerly pending corporate officership. He has never been able to adjust to having been busted back to corporal, so to speak. He has never accepted that in spite of all his hard work, in the end it is all about luck.

I have adjusted. Having been born into impoverished circumstances, and having spent 3.5 years at a boarding school that was really very primitive and underfunded, I didn't and still don't give a rodent's rear about luxury creature comforts. My wife has a similar though less economically stressful background and she didn't get used to the high lifestyle either.

We're both okay with things. At one point we were high ranking officers, promoted on the battlefield. That's all it was. Today we are back in the rank and file where we started, and it's fine.

Like Mae West I've been rich and I've been poor, but I'm not really sure rich is better. I live a stress-free life now and while we have very little financial headroom, I care little about the money situation. (Though I hope that FS Flight Training will ease some of the tightness.)

On Wall Street they say "You can eat well or you can sleep well." For me, and for my wife, it's "Sleep well."

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Dad Joiner, the Texas wildcatter who found and devloped Spindletop, died a pauper. But it was fine. As he remarked at one point, "I'm often broke. I've never been poor."

A footnote ...

Our first Manhattan apartment was on East 49th street. A neighbor in the 6-story brownstone was the actor Al Lewis, of "Grandpa Munster" fame. However, this having been NYC, in general you don't speak with your neighbors. So we knew Al to say hello to, but that was all.

Up the block a few feet was a corner cafe, a place where we liked to eat breakfast. One day there I was telling my wife what was going on in Denver at the studio. I explained that I had just had an extended conversation with Aerosmith's keyboard player, and another with the person in charge of music publishing licenses at the congressionally-chartered Harry Fox Agency in NYC. Finally, I told her about the state of our negotiations with Warner Brothers Music regarding getting permission from various artists to cover their music, the permission not legally required but certainly required morally if one was to be a good citizen of the surprisingly small music business.

A woman at the booth behind us broke in, an almost unheard of thing in The City. (There is only one.) "You know what?" she said. "This is what I love about New York. Only in this city can you overhear a conversation like the one you two are having."

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It was an interesting remark but it's not true. If you go to Los Angeles you'll hear such conversations there too. However, it's the case that in the movie business, as in the music business, there are only maybe a thousand people who are the business movers and shakers. Not the performers, but the people who make the decisions, who supply the funding, who staff the projects in a technical and management sense. The producers. The agents. The directors. The special effects experts. The lighting experts. The editors. And so on. Maybe a thousand people in all.

That's what I meant by the music business being a small world. Everybody either knows a given member of the club, or knows somebody who does.

We had reached that point. I knew the head of WBM's legal department along with his chief deputy. I had direct telephone contact with the president of WBM, and of the Fox Office, and with the chief legal counsel of RIAA. I had direct telephone contact with Aerosmith, the Steve Miller band, Roland of America, Ray Kurzweil, Stevie Wonder's MIDI guy, Stormin' Norman, Eric Satie, on and on and on.

By the time we closed our doors we had been accepted as members of the music industry scene. Weird quirky tiny members, but members nonetheless. And I must say that the people of the music business are very interesting -- and they all are into music too. Almost without exception they had been determined to find a way to work in the industry, and they succeeded.

I have to add one more thing ...

I said "Down tools at 4PM on Friday." The fact is, in NYC most people leave work at 4PM, and most people don't arrive at work till sometime around 10 AM.

Were it not for the customary delayed start of the business day, many many more people would have died in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

skylab, You've had a fascinating career. I interviewed you about it last year in the FS Open Components forum, but at my request that forum has been taken off line for a while.

Can we do this ... Would you open a thread in your blog giving the highlights of your career, and then we can do another interview.

Many forum members know you as a former airline pilot, but I doubt that very many understand that your 30-year career spanned from propliners through jetliners, and that you subsequently became a railroad locomotive engineer.

Can we give it a go?

Barbados would hardly be a "puddle jump" from NYC, even though it would be over water all the way. A pretty big puddle. Anyway, it wouldn't've been one of "our" DC-6s. We didn't fly that route unless it was a charter.

Ah...I can hear your Mother's music now: Xavier Cugat.

You mentioned one of Mae West's sayings. One of her best was when someone commented on a huge diamond ring she was wearing. The person said, "My goodness, what a ring!" And Mae answered in her famous voice, "Goodness had NOTHING to do with it!"

As to her 'rich vs poor', I'll take rich any day. I'm not, but wouldn't mind being so.

Only 3.5 years in boarding school, A? You musta been smart. Took me nearly 6 to get through!

As to: "...the highlights of your career..."

You pretty well summed it up in a nutshell. School; Propliners; Jetliners; Trains; retirement. I like the last part the best. I "became" a locomotive engineer while still flying, not after I retired. I already "knew" how to run a locomotive; just as I already "knew" how to fly before my first lesson. Kinda like cars; knew how to drive before I was "legal". Anything that is propelled by something, I can usually figure out how to operate it.

I won't be starting a separate blog. Not much more to add to the above. You can ask me anything, but I won't be giving you ALL the answers you might want. As you've no doubt noticed, I try and maintain a low profile. Not that I'm "wanted" or anything like that; it's just that I like it like that.

Instead of "puddle jumper" I should have said "island hopping". Obviously there must have been a long leg before that began. And by "your DC-6" I should have said "DC-6 such as you had flown". Yes, it was a charter.

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Xavier Cugat ... I didn't know he was from PR, thanks for that. Cugat might have been played on her favorite station, I simply don't recall. And anyway it was really Afro-Cuban and Brazilian that she and I liked. So Sergio Mendez would have been more up our alley, except that I don't remember "Sergio Mendez and Brazil 55" :D.

There used to be a Sunday morning program of Brazilian music out here on one of the NPR stations (we have two). These days we instead get unknown Mariachi, Salsa and Tejano, much of it produced locally and all of it very good.

During the period when my wife and I were based in NYC, one of the regular NPR programs showcased Egyptian pop music. Just as 4/4 is our national rhythm, so do they have one, theirs in 8/4...

Kon (rest) Kon Ko (rest)

KonKonKonKonKon Ko (rest)

Gotta love it.

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Thanks for that Mae West line. Another was "Is that a rod <gun> in your pocket? Or are you just glad to see me?"

I vividly remember her being on the Ed Sullivan show when she was in her late 70s. She looked amazingly good.

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Boarding school was from age 10 to age 13.5. I can't really say what grades that consisted of because it was a progressive school -- no formal education to speak of.

When I got to high school I was completely at sea at first because I had forgotten how to study and had never really been challenged before. That first term in prep school was truly terrifying for me.

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Hey...it mitta been one of "our" DC-6s if it was a charter, who knows? Only charter I remember in the -6 was one from Mobile to Nassau and a deadhead back to Miami when we flew at 3 thousand feet with the cockpit windows OPEN most of the way. What a racket!

I was putting Cugat in a general group of Latin American-type musicians along with the likes of Prada. Cugat was Cuban.

I've used that line a few times: "That's not a gun in my pocket, I'm just happy to see you!"