Had a weekend trip with the S/O in-between ring shopping/designing days. Traveled throughout Georgia and stopped through historic sites. Only really hit after the trip that Jimmy Carter was a direct beneficiary of the New Deal, growing up only an hour and a half’s drive (today) from FDR’s ‘vacation’ spot where he recovered from polio - and used as a place to educate himself on the needs of rural Americans. The sheer amount of wealth - personal and public - poured into the place lasted and show further accentuated the difference in legacy . On a national level, it really only seemed like Carter could streamline some of the processes left over from the New Deal and further clean up any credibility as an “outsider” after Watergate.

Anyways, used birthday gift to buy a tinywhoop and a cheap RC plane. So out of practice on aerodynamics that the RC was lost to the wind. Big bummer. Earned a tick and plenty of thorn pricks searching the woods adjacent to the field. Ended up swinging by Walmart for a kid-sized kite for a few bucks to at least enjoy the windy evening.

Both RC and TinyWhoop kit had spare brushed motors and props. I’ve been really hung up on the idea of building a light-weight monocopter using toroidal or seed-pod propeller. Got a long way to go, and should really start out making simple RC planes first.

Dipped into savings for an extremely rare impulse-buy before the tariffs kick in: a 3D printer. Figured it will pay for itself doing design-work, rather than hand-crafting from raw materials with tools I don’t have, or repeatedly purchasing spare parts.