San Francisco To Rename Street After Nancy Pelosi

As usual, Ramirez nails it......

All Gave Some, Some Gave All....

Thank you to all our Veterans on this day.

We've Arrived

Actually got here sometime last night/early this morning.

Won't be posting much while I'm here due to "Employer Paranoia".

I'll try and come up with some other topics when I have time.

Bullit Points

If you're a fan of "Bullit" with Steve McQueen, I think you'll find this little 99 cent download very interesting.
And best of all, ALL of the proceeds go to Steve's favorite organization, The Boys Republic, in Chino, California.
The Boys republic is the place McQueen went to during his somewhat troubled youth, and he creits them with turning his life around.

Get it here: http://www.bullittpoints.com/

Day 5 At Sea

Reporting from 10*13'N, 143*26'W, 19.2kts.

Had our second rehearsal today, the one where they throw all the faults, failures, and 'anomalies' at us.
We came through with flying colors, as usual.

We're supposed to catch up with the launch platform around 0300 or so, and then we'll steam along with them down to the launch site at a leisurely 11kts or so. We'll do all our systems checks using our line-of-site microwave links, and run the last rehearsal.

Then it's one day to set up, one day to launch, one day to tear down, and head for home.

Just hanging out in my cube tonight watching "Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex".

Was going through a link a Ham buddy sent me, and I found a QSL card from the guy that taught me Morse Code oh so many years ago. Cel was quite a guy. He had served many years as a shipboard Radio Officer, and could talk to you, smoke a cigarette, drink a cup of coffee, and carry on a conversation in CW at 20+ wpm on the radio.

Quite a guy........

Quiet Day At Sea

Reporting from 15*50'N, 137*28'W

Well....we're about half-way to the launch site. The weather's been cloudy, and over the next day or two we'll be going through the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a.k.a "The Doldrums".

This means we'll hit some rain, sometimes quite heavy, but no particular  "storms" to mention.

Had our safety training on boarding/unboarding the helicopter, and a few other things. One of the pilots giving the life vest part actually pulled the ring so we could see how fast they inflate, and how big they got. Seems if you pop one open, you'll have some trouble getting out through the window, which you push out to act as the emergency exit if things get so bad as to require a water "landing". The Bell 212 we have onboard is equipped with floats, BUT if you slide the doors open, they slice into the floats, a definite Bad Thing!

One really good thing they did when this ship was in drydock a couple of months ago was to polish and rebalance the propeller. For the first time at-sea, the vibration level is very low, and things don't rattle around in our office area, which is at the stern of the ship.

Not much else going on for now. We'll get insanely busy the closer we get to the launch site, so we're all enjoying the time to relax for now.

May 2012 Annular Eclipse At Sea

Reporting from 26*43'N, 125*28'W

WELL....nobody thought to bring any solar filters, so we're all being very careful, and only looking at the Sun when it's partially obscured by clouds.

There's a big bite out of the Sun, and it's noticeably darker than normal for this time of day.

Other than that, no excitement, nothing to report. The seas are calm, and we're only rolling a little bit.

I mad a BIG mistake yesterday by having too much for lunch, and it caught up to me about dinner time. My first day out I get a little queasy, so I eat light, and try to take an afternoon nap.

Didn't do either this time, and by 7PM I wasn't feeling too crisp. Climbed in my bunk about 8pm, read for an hour, and then s;ept for about 12 hours!

I'm reading "Iron Eagle" by Thomas Coffey, and out of the three books I bought about General Curtis LeMay, I think it's the best.

I do a post about LeMay in the next week or so, after I've finished "Iron Eagle", and "Mission With LeMay", which is his biography. He's a very different man than the press, and unfortunately history, portray him as. He NEVER said "Bomb Them Back To The Stone Age", although that quote is often attributed to him. It actually came from "Mission With LeMay", and was fabricated by his ghost writer, MacKinlay Kantor. LeMay was in the middle of many things at the time his "biography" was being written, and didn't proof read it as completely as he should have. He later stated that he regretted not being more careful about what went in to the book, and as a result, a lot of misconceptions abound about him.

That's it for tonight. Going to watch a DVD, and hit the hay.

Ready, Set, GO!

Just shutting things down for the night. I have to pick up a buddy (ex Airborne Ranger, two terms in Nam) that I work with in the morning, and then off we go!
Y'all be good now, hear?

Finishing My Preps To Get Underway

Took in my laptop, backpack full of DVD's, camera, and lenses this week.
Packing my rolling duffle tonight, and I'll drag that onboard tomorrow, as I hate waiting for the luggage lift they do.
Friday night I'm the auctioneer at my radio club's "White Elephant Sale" where we raise money for Field Day, and I don't want to be bothered with any support functions Saturday morning when I board the ship, so I'm 95% ready-to-go.
If the launch goes off on time, I should be back on June 9th.
The 870 is cleaned and loaded with low recoil 00 buck, and my YF and stepson know how to use it.
Her TRR8 357 is cleaned and loaded, and she also has three speed loaders ready to go.
And she knows how to use them all.
I think I can sleep soundly, knowing there's a bit of firepower readily available, along with our two 80 pound dogs......

Food Preps..."A Week In A Bucket"

I'll be the first to admit that my (our) long-term food storage preps could use a little more finesse.

Water?
Check!
Purifier?
Check!
First Aid?
Check! (courtesy of my son the EMT)
Communications? (you're kidding, right?)
CHECK!
Food?.....Food??......FOOD?!?
Uh, here, sir....kinda.

We have several cases of MRE's,  a couple of cases of various canned meats, a couple of cases of soups and such, and a LOT of those fancy freeze-dried "camping" type meals that I bought when I was single, and before I knew better.

I've considered buying some of those "#10 cans" of stuff from the various purveyors of such, but what do you DO with all that stuff once you have it?

Lacking a plan on how to sort/organize/store/use it, I did what most people do.

Nothing......

WELL.....I stumbled across this article over at Mr. Rawles' place, and I'm stoopified at how simple it is.

You make up a week's worth of balanced meals (7 breakfast, 7 lunch, 7 dinner) out of all the stuff you've accumulated, and pack it away into "A Week In A Bucket", and store the buckets until needed.

Makes a pretty good grab-and-go, eat-for-a-week bug-out item, too.

Remarkably simple, and an excellent example of the kind of clear-headed, logical thinking that can save your butt when TSHTF.

.

High-Performance HF Transceiver Design

From EDN Online.
It's an excellent article that describes the State-Of-The-Current-Art in radio design.
I'd expand on the article a bit more, but I'm too tired to care about much tonight.......