Happy Thanksgiving – I Am Thankful For…

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– Posted on November 24, 2022

I’d like to extend my best wishes to all of you celebrating Thanksgiving.

I have so much to be thankful for, but there’s one in particular I’d like to share with you.

That would be you; the CC community. All of you have played one role or another in making this a genuine community, one that espouses similar interests but also has high values on quality, integrity and most of all an open and sincere interest in learning and sharing from each other. That has become something of a rare commodity these days, given the fractious online and real world we live in. Something precious has been built here.

My own relationship to CC has evolved over these almost 12 years. The first some years were one of unbridled energy and enthusiasm to build something worthwhile. As a consequence, CC grew rapidly, but there was a price to pay for that, as there always is, in less attention to other demands as well as free time. That led to a period of increasing frustration and burnout, which led to me coming extremely close to selling the site in 2018. Fortunately, I listened to an inner voice that said “no”; how can you sell a community?

But the challenges of running essentially a 24/7 operation with very little remuneration wore on me more and more, culminating in my “retirement” in 2019, which ended up lasting five months. I’m so grateful to Jim Klein and others for stepping in during that time; I assume they knew I’d be back.

It was a tremendous relief to be free as a bird for those five months, and we took several trips in the van including a lengthy one up through the Canadian Rockies, a trip I never wrote up here. Speaking of, we met up with David Saunders for a lovely dinner, and I am of course deeply grateful for his taking on the task of being our tech support some years back. One of the main reasons I contemplated selling the site was because of the recurring tech problems we had before David took over; it was an endless thorn in my side, now it’s a distant memory.

I can’t properly acknowledge all of you who have given so much to make CC what it is, but I would like to mention two who play a key role behind the scenes, Vince C and Eric703, who have tirelessly kept our manual archiving system updated, a thankless job that we so easily take for granted.

And of course there’s all of you who have ever and continue to contribute; hundreds of you, each giving of their own measure. As it should be. And then there’s you, the readers who make all this worthwhile. All of our contributors do so because they genuinely feel they are contributing something worthwhile that will be appreciated as well as furthering the collective knowledge, wisdom and understanding. And that is invariably enhanced by your comments. I have learned more form them over the years than I could possibly have ever imagined. They have greatly expanded not just my knowledge, but my appreciation for the near-infinite ways that our interest in cars and other related subjects is manifested. I’m touched and honored for all you’ve shared here with us. I am a much better informed and a more tolerant and accepting person as a consequence.

As is self-evident, I am not writing as many long-form posts as I once did. In order to come back from my “retirement” and make peace with running CC, I had to change my priorities and spend more time on other aspects of my life. I have done so, and have found a happy balance. That includes spending quite a bit of time at our Port Orford place, where I’ve been working quite a lot this past year converting the pole barn into a cozy cabin. it’s almost finished.

I may not write as much as I’d ideally like, but it’s more important to achieve and maintain that balance, the result being that I am very happy to continue playing my role here for the foreseeable future. And if there comes a time I feel I need to cut back further or give up my role, it will be in a way that will respect what has been created. Meaning, I will never sell CC or hand the reins over to someone that is not already a CC insider. I feel a sense of stewardship for what has been created here, a vast repository of over 19k posts and 770k comments of information, insight, humor, pathos, disdain, and a whole lot more, thanks to all of you .

My cup runneth over. Thanks to you all, and Happy Thanksgiving.