Is Rick's place still there?

It is 0530 and I am awake which I suppose is OK except for the fact that I woke at 0330 and tried to go back to sleep and could not.




This sucks because by late afternoon I will be tired and I will have to fight to stay awake or else I'll repeat the process of waking up early again. While I generally make the sea to shore switch pretty easily, once in a while I need a spare day to get settled in.



There is a change in a person's system when they either go to sea or come ashore and it is something the average landsman doesn't have to deal with. Sleep patterns have to be changed and so do digestive patterns as even a person's diet changes.



Like I said, usually the change is a snap for an old salt like me, but every so often the old body and mind decides to fight it a bit and it takes a little more time for me to settle in.



I arrived home yesterday at 0100 and sacked out at about 0230 after taking care of the immediate things that go with coming home. The first step is generally to open something containing alcohol and grab the cat and give him some serious attention to let him know I'll be home for a while so he can settle down.



It's pretty amazing how excited an animal will get when I get home and he purrs and carrys on and acts all excited. Then there are various other things that have to be adjusted and reset all over the house as Mrs. Pic doesn't use a lot of the things that I do. I suppose it only takes a few minutes to charge in and reset everything the way I like them but I take my time to unwind after the long trek home.



When Kitty settles down a bit, I grab the mail that has accumulated and dig into that. This time it was a couple of bills and a stack of QSL cards, most of which were from overseas or were from special events stations. Those are fun to open as it is satisfying to see the list of needed QSLs for a DXCC award shrivel down. Eight more entities confirmed and maybe I'll just try to get my DXCC the same way I got my WAS (Worked all States) and that is by paper confirmation. We'll see.



Oh, yeah. My FCC paperwork caught up with me and I now have my license upgraded to Amateur Extra which means I no longer have to add the latters 'AE' to my callsign when I am using the frequencies reserved for Extras.



Anyway, I sacked at about 0230 and when I woke up I thought things were OK until I realized that I had not reset the two clocks I use and nobody else does so I knew I was an hour off schedule and Kitty had woken me up too early.



When this happens and you get out of sync you generally spend your first day home with a low grade headache which sucks because although you can likely make it go away with a nap, the nap will screw up the cycle aand in the long run it is simply just better to drag the day on until about 2100 or so and then sack out on schedule and get things back into sync.



Normally what causes everything to get thrown into a haywire condition is a lousy crew change and this time that's what happened. I had a five-hour drive in a van before I even got to my pickup to start the run home. You arrive home somewhat toasted.



At least the van driver was interesting. He had been born in Morocco and I asked him if he had been raised in Marrakach and he said he had been raised in Casablanca. Of course, with a straight face I asked him, "Casablanca, huh? Is Rick's Place was still there?" and was treated to watching his face start to think, grow confused, figure out what I had asked. He then showed the sheepish look of a guy that realized he has just had his leg pulled a bit and then his face turned triumphant.



"He closed it down in '42, smuggled himself back to the States, met up with Elsa, married her and they had a bunch of kids together," he answered, much to my amusement.



"Oh, good," I replied. "I love a happpy ending."



He had been in the States almost two decades and it warms my heart to see an immigrant become an American and pick up on what passes for humor in this country. We chatted and discussed how little the average American really knows about places outside of the country.



On the other hand, a lot of people that live overseas likely think we are all a bunch of cowboys over here. Then again, to some extent they may be right. Back when I was in the army and went to Europe briefly I dressed like a cowboy for the hell of it and drew considerable interest even though I don't think I'd dress like that overseas in this day and age.



Still, I am home and it is good to be home.



I went to the garage yesterday and noticed something that has been there for years and it is a can of STP engine flush which I must have gotten off of a ship somewhere because the front of the can is in English and the directions of the back of the can are in Russian. Interesting. Why I have that is beyond me.



The antenna is plugged into the rig and I suppose I am ready for a hitch of shoreside operations.



Oh, yeah. Yesterday the do-good lady down the street dropped by to ask me if the 43 foot vertical antenna in my yard is dangerous. I suppose I could have said simply that it wasn't and left it at that but she is a pest and even though she has no kids, she is one of these dumb-assed 'Do it for the children' types.



I wasn't in any mood to deal with her.



I told her that anyone touching it when I was transmitting was likely to get a pretty painful RF burn and I described a hideous internal set of burns that come from the inside and work their way out, complete with bubbling flesh. She got excited and started babbling on about the safety of the children.



I told her that the FCC has been through this hassle several times before and that the only one that has the authority to make me remove it is a HOA and I am not in one. Legally she doesn't have a leg to stand on and besides after I shot six or seven kids in the ass with a BB gun they stay out of my yard so there's no problem.



She got all worked up and left in a huff. I suppose that my friendly, local neighborhood cop will drop by inside a few days as I know she's going to call. Big deal. I helped his kid get started on a 2 meter rig a while back so I suppose the cop knows the rules and will tell her I am legal and to lay off, although if he sees me in the yard he is likely to stop and tell me to quit even though he likely thinks what I did to the dumbass is kind of funny.



It is now about 0700 and I see the kids going out and waiting for the school bus. Life goes on. It wasn't very long ago I was one of them. Forty-five years passes in the blink of an eye.



Yesterday around noon I went shoopping for a few things and bought a piece of fish at the supermarket deli and sat down in the open table area to eat it. All of the tables were sort of stuffed except for one seat and I wound up sitting next to a high school sophomore which was kind of interesting. It's been over 45 years since I was a high school sophomore and it was interesting to hear from him and see that things haven't changed a lot. He likes being a sophomore and was surprised to hear me tell him my sophomore year sucked.



He's on the swim team and we talked about swimming. He told me about the team and I told him about diving in a rock quarry. His mom came by and sat down and listened a bit and wasn't too thrilled to hear of me diving off a railroad trestle seconds before the train came rumbling through.
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