[Porsche-O-Phile]

Thankfully we're pretty busy right now, but that's because of careful positioning over the last few months/years with selected clients. We've avoided doing residential work, knowing that residential was a house of cards that was on borrowed time (and borrowed everything else, especially money, apparently). I think we're going to be okay although there's a lot of uneasiness out there and nobody's going to go gangbusters crazy like they've done in years past. Steady, sustained, manageable pace. That's just fine by me and I actually prefer it to traditional "boom/bust" cyclical nonsense that tends to define design/construction.

I'm thanking my lucky stars that I got out of aviation as I did a few years ago. At the time it was a terribly painful decision for me (I loved flying, I was very good at it and it broke my heart to leave the industry), but every passing day seems to underscore how much it was the correct one. I would NOT want to be in that industry right now with its perilous dependence on skyrocketing fuel costs. I feel for a lot of the guys still there that I left behind (who didn't have the benefit of having a "hedge" in another field like I did). I suspect that the coming months/years are going to be very, very bad for a lot of guys still flying, unless they're very high on the seniority lists. . .

As painful as all this is going to be, I'm hopeful that it's "growing pains" and it serves the ultimate end of making us stronger and more resilient/sustainable/sensible as a society and an economy. We've put WAY too much focus on wanton drunken-sailor spending for the last 10-or-so years. It's about time that we got back down to earth and started to temper some of that idiocy with common sense. It does not benefit us to simply be stimulated into a constant fervor of crazed spending at all times. I think we're finally starting to (maybe) realize that. The pullback will be hard, it WILL involve a recession and significant contraction in some areas, but I'm hopeful that it instills a sensibility in our economy that has been sorely lacking for a long, long time.