Sunset Above the Clouds
“An idea I live by comes from a John Wayne movie called Rio Lobo. John Wayne and Jack Elam are on one side of a crick shooting their guns at the bad guys on the other side. John Wayne looks down at Jack Elam and says “Scatter gun’s useless.” Jack Elam says “Don’t mind if I shoot, do you? It just makes me feel better.”
“I love that attitude. If you don’t shoot, you have no chance of killing the bad guys on the other side of the river. If you don’t shoot, you have no chance of making a basket. You have to be willing to try.
“I balance that with an idea I take from Clint Eastwood’s movie Magnum Force. Toward the end of the movie, Clint Eastwood squares off with a dirty cop who’d tried to kill him. He secretly activates a bomb in the cop’s car and as the cop drives off his car blows up. Clint Eastwood says “Man’s gotta know his limitations.”
“That’s the other thing I think about when I’m coaching. Everybody should understand what they can and cannot do.”
Roy Williams, Hard Work: A life on and off the court
For those of you who do not know, I was born and raised a Tarheel fan and that definitely gets me in trouble this time of year living in Kentucky. I may bleed the wrong color blue (powder instead of big), but at least once a year and often twice one of my favorite teams has to lose. But these words of wisdom comes from a coach who just earned the title of fastest to 300 wins in the ACC and they seem to be particularly applicable to me the past few days. Plus, Coach Williams is fiercely competitive which is a trait I can relate to entirely too well. Tonight, I am hoping my fellow Kentuckians will forgive my “incorrect” powder blue preferences and unite with me to beat the true enemy. Go Heels. Beat Dook!!!!
Snow Line
Snowy Horse Farms at Dusk
I first heard this quote (thanks to Audible audiobooks) as I drove on snow-covered roads to the airport to attempt to do some remote sensing. I wasn’t particularly happy about this outing because if you think about the percentage of land that had good remote sensing conditions last weekend is incredibly low. And Kentucky had just received some more snow. So much snow that our first attempt of flying Saturday had been thwarted completely. I was totally skeptical and ready to turn around and go back to bed. But, after about an hour of scheming, we took off. We almost had to go back, though, because I didn’t have video so I couldn’t tell if the camera door was frozen shut or if the vide was just being finicky. Scary and embarrassing at the same time. But, I managed to get things working and it turned out to be a pretty successful day of 20 lines spread across four states (AR, TN, MS, and KY) and 395 images. (It has been QC-ed and everything was accepted!!!)
Sunset on the propeller
If I had gone with my original gut feeling and not shot the imagery, I would have been really frustrated. Not to mention the fact that I probably would have been driving back on roads that were still nasty from the snow we received overnight. Instead, I worked. When I drove home that night, the roads were nearly clear and we had several hundred images “in the can” so to speak. Productivity! And, along with that, we were smart and knew our limitations on Saturday. Yes, we probably missed some photography but we were safe. And, yes, I love my job. Writing very detailed FGDC Remote Sensing Extension metadata one day and flying the data the next!
But this quote is one I am going to try to take to heart in more ways than just remote sensing because I truly believe that hard work has the potential to pay off in all aspects of our lives.
