Time to say goodbye....

Recently, I have been trying hard to come up with ideas that would help my family and I recover from the burglary that took place on Thanksgiving. People just don’t seem to understand that there is a lot more that impacts you from a burglary than the materials taken. You have a sense of violation so great that it is traumatic. It can consume you and impact you socially too.

I have posted to online forums to try to brainstorm ideas about ways to make my family’s GoFundMe improve on helping us find enough resources to enable us to get back to the minimums we need to be able to operate once more. I was quite adamant that I wanted IDEAS, not money when I have posted at places; ideas are worth more than money to me. When I was badgered to such a point on these posts, I gave a link to my family’s original GoFundMe that was no longer accepting donations. I did that with an express purpose – to show that my posts were NOT about money. How can you donate to us if you only had a link to something that wasn’t accepting them? Think about it for a moment. I was asking for ideas and not money. I explained it in the first post that I was not after money with the post but wanted ideas of what could be done to help us get back on our feet.

Immediately people started calling me a fraud, said that I was trying to scam people and/or blamed my family and I for the burglary and not having insurance. I posted links to another online forum that is local to me where they talked about our burglary. I also posted links to the police report, the Investigative Request and Forensics order. I did redact sections of it so I could protect friends from possible harm, that compromised their privacy and for general security reasons. I removed last names of my friends, my street address and signatures. That is all that was modified it and should make sense to you unless you are dense or an idiot. I did get a few ideas from it however that were useful and I acted upon them.

I was actually tested about what happened by a mod on an online forum. They asked me if I knew a certain person and implied the person was a man. I immediately stated the person’s first name and that they were actually female. We shot a few more messages to each other to such an extent that the mod knew I was not lying about what happened and our need was real. They gave me a few more ideas about where to look for help after that.

I also needed help mentally and emotionally. I reached out and stated I needed more content on various groups to help me cope with what happened. A lot of people sent things my way. Others seized upon what caused me to need support and started to look for any little thing they could to prove I was lying. I didn’t want to talk about it because it was something that hurt just too damn much to discuss for me; it brought everything fresh in my mind and I couldn’t handle it. When that occurred, I stated that I couldn’t discuss it anymore at that moment, that if they really wanted to know what happened to go to a specific link – to a deactivated GoFundMe page. I then logged off and went into my bedroom, tried to read but then started to cry. I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

When I got back on, guess what happened? I found people accusing me of being a fraud, that I was trying to scam them out of money, etc. all over again. Again, when I posted the link it was to one that wasn’t accepting donations and therefore wasn’t being used to fundraise. How can you donate anything to something that isn’t accepting donations?

I went through the posts of others where they shared stuff to help me get past where I was at mentally; memes, cartoons and photos helped. We discussed how much it sucked to have suffered from what had happened. I responded with photos and discussed how this action by a criminal harmed me and my family. It was therapeutic. Then the *******s arrived once more. They attacked me again, accusing me of something I wasn’t doing and then went to my wall and posted derogatory things. That was crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

I have lost all joy in computers from the burglary. I used to jump up and rush to help others when they had problems with their systems. I didn’t accept payment for my services on many occasions because it just felt good to help others. After the burglary, people tried to get me to jump up and help them again but I just couldn’t do it; it hurt too much to think about computers. Often it was transparent to me that the people were asking for help to either non-existent problems or ones that I could walk them through over the phone. It was a nice attempt but my passion was gone and I just couldn’t get my mind around it again.

Another escape for me has always been aviation. I loved to fly. I started getting flying lessons at the age of 16 while at a boarding military school about 70 miles west of Washington, DC. I channeled every bit of extra energy I had learning to fly and preparing for the FAA exams. I soloed after 6.5 hours of instruction and built up time. My school year ended and I returned home to California. My father accepted a new position with a National Laboratory that forced us to move out of state. Once we were settled in, I started to fly once more. Mountain flying was totally different than close to sea level flight and I was learning a lot more.

I did quite well learning to fly in the Southern Rockies; things such as leaning out the mixture were done there that I didn’t learn to do at boarding school. I flew from Santa Fe (KSAF) because Los Alamos Municipal had some rules that made it difficult to be a student. They required you to take off on runway 9 and land 27 due to a restricted area. Pilots had to have received a permit to use the runways in Los Alamos – my flight instructor’s permit was 622. They also had specific flight paths you were allowed to take; to enter the pattern, you had to fly over White Rock’s Overlook Park or the Otowi Bridge. These flight paths converged at the White Rock Y and you entered final there.

On my first cross country solo flight I went to Alamosa, CO. My family lived there at one time and I knew a lot of people there. When I landed, I decided to call some friends and just talk for a bit. In my excitement, I lost track of time and when I did look up, I saw I was already 15 minutes late. I ran out to the plane, jumped in and taxied away to take off. That was a huge mistake.

As I climbed out of Alamosa towards New Mexico, my engine started to run rough. I started looking at my kneeboard and looked through procedures. Nothing would stop the engine’s roughness. I continued to climb so I wouldn’t go through one of flying “rock filled clouds”. Suddenly, my engine stopped. I quickly started reviewing emergency procedures and looking around for a place to land. I chose highway 285. As I descended, my engine started up and I relaxed. I continued to fly towards Santa Fe.

I started to climb back up to 12,000 feet when my engine started acting up again. I called Taos Unicom and told them what was going on. Other pilots radioed me with things to try. Nothing worked. As I flew over the canyons carved by the Rio Grande, my engine started to lose power; my RPMs continued to drop in spurts. I looked for safe places to land once more. My engine then stopped again. I lined up on the Royal Gorge bridge west of Taos because it looked like my best option. I trimmed myself up, got to the best glide speed and noticed I didn’t have the altitude to make it. I thought I was doomed.

I decided to trade airspeed for altitude. I lowered flaps and as the nose of the plane lifted, I pulled back on the stick to porpoise. I would climb until I would almost get to stall speed and then drop the nose to regain speed with a little bit of a loss of altitude. I did this 3 or 4 times when I realized I could land at Taos but it would be downwind. I called Taos Unicom, stated what I was going to do and concentrated at the task at hand.

I came in at the wrong angle. I needed to bank the plane really hard to line up to the runway at the last moment. I touched down just barely onto the runway and came to a stop. I had stopped before the end of the “landing” mark and didn’t even make it to the VASI. I quickly grabbed the nose wheel bar and dragged the plane off the active runway so others may land. As soon as I cleared the runway, I sat on the ground and cried. I knew I barely made it.

After I was able to regain my composure, I started to think about what I did wrong and it hit me. I failed to do one of the most important things you had to do when you are about to fly; I didn’t do the walk around inspection. I decided to do it right then to see if I could figure out what went wrong. I drained the sump on one wing and noticed a lot of water at the bottom of the tool. I went to the other wing and did the same. It came out with a lot of water too. I continued to the inspection until I got to the engine where I drained the sump again. Guess what? Water once more, about half of the gauge was full. I knew right then what caused this mess to occur; I had formed carb ice.

I taxied the plane to the tie down area and tied it down. I went into the fixed base operation and made a call to my flight instructor. We discussed things for a bit and I told her I would continue on to Santa Fe as soon as I calmed down. As I sat there, other flyers walked up to me and asked if I was the one that had the emergency. It was hard for me to talk about it but I did better as more time passed. I went out to the plane after a while and performed another walk around inspection; I had learned a valuable lesson. I flew on to Santa Fe’s airport and called it a day.

My flight instructor and I talked about what happened. I told her that I had enough flying for the day. Ruth flew us back up to Los Alamos and I didn’t touch the yoke the entire way. We talked about the plane with others and had found out what happened and why.

The plane came from Alaska and the previous owner had put rubber bladders inside the wings for one reason or another. As I took off and climbed out of Alamosa, the turbulence must have released a seem that had a pocket of water in it. That was all it took. As I continued to climb, the temperature would drop and my carburetor would ice up. As I dropped down, the temperature would increase enough that the carb heat would melt the ice. My climbing would then get me to such a height that the temperature would cause carb ice to form again. I would drop once again, temperature increase would carb heat cleared it once more. When I flew over the canyons, the winds from that caused it to freeze again and carb heat did nothing at that point which led me to the end.

I learned several lessons that day. I learned that you have to follow every point on the checklist, and some stupid things that I did that worked but could have killed me and nearly did. I continued to fly. My ground school instructor was also the FAA examiner for the area. When I did my check ride, he pulled the power to simulate an emergency. He knew that I knew the correct procedures to follow if that happened because we had discussed my mistakes before. Instead of finding a place to land in front of me, he told me to pick a place next to us and circle in to land. I passed Dick Brown’s check ride and continued to pursue my passion.

I had to stop flying a few years back. I had developed problems with my eyes and funds were getting tight. I decided to go back to school to keep a promise to my Dad about getting as much education as I could. Financially it wouldn’t be a problem due to multiple reasons. I had enough to live upon and a little extra. I achieved astounding results when I returned to school; the longer I continued my education, my GPA would grow. I completed an Associate of Applied Science with a 3.86 on a 4.0 scale. My Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology was a 3.98. My first Masters was done in Germany and I had a perfect GPA. I did the same with my second Masters. I made a deal with a program at another school. I would attend their school until I reached the phase where I could start to conduct research while I did humanitarian pursuits; Mexico City had just had a major earthquake and I wanted to help. My wife and I traveled back to Cuernavaca, Morelos to help.

While Mexico City and Puebla got the most news about the impact of the earthquake, I learned that Cuernavaca was hardest hit. The size of the populations of each of those cities was orders of magnitude higher than Cuernavaca and therefore had the most interest. I knew that relief efforts would be concentrated in those other cities and decided to help in another city. My wife and I started helping people rebuild their lives with IT.

I learned to love the Mexican people and what they stood. The stereotypes and bad press from the United States were far from the truth. Bad news sells newspapers. I helped them any way I could. I spewed the truth to all I could; I found the Mexican people hated the Drug Cartels even more than Americans. I also realized that the truth about the drug problem was caused by the United States. All you had to do to find it was to look in the mirror. There are so many people out there that want illegal drugs that there has to be someone to meet the demand. If we really wanted to do something about the problem, we would do things that decreased demand. Guess what? By going after the cartels and users didn’t decrease the demand.

My home burglary occurred on November 22, 2018 at approximately 2:52 pm. This is the time the video shows. There is very little footage because Zmodo cameras were set up to only record when there was motion sensed. Most of the action was inside our home and not in the yard. We see the burglars come into the house and one guy carrying things out in 3 of them. There was no more footage because the burglars had gotten to our office and disconnected the router from the Internet. Zmodo cameras record directly to their servers online and if there was no router, there was no connection to the Net.

I lost all passion for computers, aviation and a whole lot more. The fact of the matter is that I have thought about suicide a lot recently and immediately put it out of my mind. I couldn’t do that to my Mom – she has lost a son already, my son because I was the only thing he has had throughout his life, and my wife. My Mother-In-Law moved down from Alaska recently and that had a part to do with why we stopped our insurance – to be able to afford to pay for her move. My wife has her mother now and she can be used as a replacement. I think it is time to enter the abyss.

I hope every that reads this and learns something from it. Bullies, jerks and others can significantly hurt others to such an extent that one turns to ways to end the hurt. I know I am going to do whatever is needed to end my pain.