I wrote this back in 2002. Long read.

Blaine is dead now. He has been for quite a while. He was the lucky charm of the Kodiak fleet for quite a while following the dubious honor of being shipwrecked three times in ten days, and living to tell the tale. Many fishermen would tousle his hair for luck before they left on a trip. Everyone was amazed that he had the guts to go out again even after the first shipwreck. In an ironic twist of fate he was killed in a pleasure boat accident off the New Jersey coast several years ago.

I didn’t get word of Blaine’s death until about a year after if happened, and that was through a mutual friend that had gone to visit his mother. His mother gave him a Zippo that I had gotten engraved and had given to Blaine after the ten days reign of fear.

“Run as fast as you will and escape if you can, for you are the quarry and fate is the hunter,” the lighter said. The mutual friend recognized the lighter and returned it to me, along with news of his death. I carried it briefly until the integrated unit I was working on made a run to New York. Off the coast of New Jersey, near the sight of the accident, I threw it over the side. Fate had caught up with Blaine, and it was only fitting that the lighter be buried with him.
And, quite frankly, it weighed too damned heavily in my pocket. Seafarers of all types, especially fishermen are superstitious as all hell.
Blaine was a high-school dropout with a Master’s degree in life. He could do two things, as I recall, that impressed me: He could make any cheap flashlight work under any circumstances, and he could drive my vehicle with no instruction.
To anyone that uses a flashlight regularly, that says a lot. Bill Gates probably can’t. As for the latter? Well… that was a miracle among the order of loaves and fishes. I had built the truck, a ’62 Dodge, in Seattle out of parts, I had maybe $26 tied up in it, and had managed to nurse it up the Alaska Highway. That’s a tale in itself, and one I’m perversely proud of. The truck was one of the joys in my life. It was obstinate, moody, cranky, and had a mind of it’s own, but she never quit me.

I drive a brand new Toyota these days, which I find disgusting because the damned thing is sterile. Come 100,000 miles, it’ll develop some character. I hate new things. No character.

One of our last conversations was about the author John Irving. I asked him if the book, Hotel New Hampshire was any good.

“Typical John Irving,” he said. “Whores, bears and farts. It was as funny as hell, though, you’d like it.”

Farts are something I’ll save for Howard Stern.

My bear story is pretty brief. I was picking salmonberries to make wine and jelly out of once, when I heard a rustle and say that behind the bush, a huge Brownie was standing there. I let out a start, took off and shot up a skinny tree. When I looked behind me, the bear was running in the opposite direction.

I stopped shaking like a baby’s rattle in well under an hour. A stiff belt of cognac helped.
I really don’t have a whole lot of use for prostitution, not that I have a whole lot against it, but it just isn’t my vice, but there are three tales in my life involving whores.

There was a pretty interesting deal in Kodiak as far as the local hookers went. The madam hired from the Astoria area and really had a pretty good eye for what it took to work for her. One thing was basic honesty, and a certain amount of integrity in the way they acted.
They were quiet and acted like ladies. They did not drink too much or drug. They were discreet and when they were cruising, they melted in with the furniture. They could afford to be discreet and invisible, because in a commercial fishing town customers would go looking for them. There was no room in the town for sleazy or rough stuff. One incident and the police chief would close them down in a heartbeat.

The key to a successful, quiet night on the town is reconnaissance, and these women were recon specialists extrodanaire. Carnac the Magnificent couldn’t hold a candle to the talents of the Kodiak hookers. They intuitively knew who was going to do what, when and where, and who was going to go off on a tear and make an ass of himself. They also had quite a nose for trouble. I’m sure this saved my ass a couple of times.

If a guy treated these women with any degree of decency, they were pretty generous with their knowledge. Some of them also played cribbage when times were slow and I whiled away many an hour playing cards with one or two of them.

One Christmas eve, I wandered into Tony’s to see if anyone wanted to go to Midnight mass. The only taker was one of the hookers. She was discreet enough to ask me quietly and met me outside so as not to create a scene. She didn’t have to do that. I wasn’t embarrassed in the least.

I got a fair amount of flak over that, but in the process, I found out who the real Christians were in town. You guessed it, the drunks, sheepherders, and fishermen. The usual church goers were pretty uppity to me for a while after that incident. I told several of them to feel free to use the piece of mistletoe that I had clipped to my shirt tail.

When she found out about all the social shit I got into about it, she swore revenge. When she left town for good a couple of months later, she left an envelope with the bartender to be delivered to me. It contained her client book with all sorts of sordid details. This was a dangerous thing, and as you can probably imagine, whose names were in it. All sorts of so-called decent citizens, many of whom had shit all over me for bringing her to mass.

I never used any of the information in it, and I’ll tell you this: If I had 200 pounds of C-4 explosive, I could not have done half as much damage to the town as I could have with that little notebook. It was like having my own nuclear bomb! I never even told anyone I had it!

Proper style, for me, upon entering the bar, was to plunk down next to one of the ladies of the night, buy her a drink, and look around a while. After I sensed the mood of the place, and had found out what was going on, I’d move around. Or, if the place had an air of ugliness about it, I’d leave.

This was not paranoia on my part, just good sense. Life on the Last Frontier could get pretty weird when it wanted to. Like when a drug dealer would bring a bunch of Quaaludes or mushrooms into town and peddle them at cut-rate prices. When that happened, it was best to get the hell out of there and find something else to do. Half the town would be whacked-out., which was pretty normal when you think about it. But when Quaaludes are mixed with alcohol, it’s depressing. I’d get tired of moving inert, passed out bodies out of the way.

Mushrooms were another story. People would get animated as all git-go. When mushrooms came to town in any quantity, it would be time to hide. When mixed with large quantities of alcohol, some people could do nothing but sit and laugh themselves goofy. I’m patient. I can wait. If I wanted to see a three-ring circus, all I had to do is wait until summer until Barnum and Bailey arrived. Or go fishing.

Katie was the third whore that entered my life, and she’s my favorite. In fact, she isn’t even a whore. Katie worked as an office girl in downtown. She wasn’t particularly pretty, nor was she ugly. She had a way about her that men enjoyed. She was blunt spoken, had the tact of a .45 automatic being thrust in your face, and had an outrageous and ribald sense of humor that occasionally appeared. She could joust verbally with the guys, dishing it out and taking her lumps. She didn’t sleep with every Tom, Dick and Harry, nor was she a vestal virgin. She was not impressed with a lot of bullshit credentials and kept herself pretty squared away,

I privately call her The Whore of Life.

I wandered into Tony’s with Al’s wife, Judy. We were both waiting to see Al. Al owed me money. Katie was sitting at a table, looking like she wanted to be picked on. She had that sporting for an argument look about her. I went to the bar…the place was dead… and picked up drinks for Judy and I. We went over and sat next to Katie. Judy and Katie chatted a bit. Then Katie looked at me and asked me how I was.

“Pretty good after this last trip,” I said. “but that storm left me so damned horny that I’d even go so far as to even give YOU a hundred bucks for a piece of ass!” It was a good natured insult that I knew she would not let slide. I braced myself. Katie could be quick-witted as a rattlesnake, and I expected a mildly profane retort.

Instead, I found myself trying not to let twelve year-old scotch whisky squirt out my nose!

“Get your cash up on the table!” Big Boy,” she said. She turned to Judy, who was slack-jaw astonished. “The goddam rent is due, and I’m fifty bucks short and I gotta eat until Tuesday!”

Judy laughed. I reached into my jeans pocket. I knew this game. It had nothing to do with sex or money. The object of the game was to keep a straight face and see who would quit the game first. I threw a pair of fifties on the table with a straight-faced leer.

Katie opened her blouse, grabbed the hundred bucks and stuffed the bills into her bra. She stood up. “Let’s go,” she announced.

We both left quickly, leaving Judy with an astonished look on her face. When we got outside, I expected Katie to bust out laughing and hand me my money back. After all, the look on Judy’s face was priceless. Instead, she hopped into my truck. I got in and fired the old ’62 Dodge up, put her into gear and started to Katie’s apartment. I still didn’t know what she was up to.

She was abrupt and short with me until we got inside her apartment. At which point she startled me by starting to get undressed.

“Ya gonna screw me, or what?” she asked.

“Katie, if you need the lousy hundred, call it a loan,” I said.

“Take your frigging clothes off me and screw me.”

“Is there a method to this madness?”

“Yes. Now screw me.”

So I did, and I was very selfish. The whole act didn’t take very long. She commented on that, and I snapped back that she had gotten paid for it, so shut up and went over to my clothes.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting dressed.”

“Get back in bed!”

So I got back in bed.

“I hate having sex with someone for the first time because guys like you are so damned keyed up that I ought to have charged you TWO hundred bucks. Now we can both relax because the ice has been broken. Besides, I needed the hundred bucks to spend on my new sweetie this weekend.”

“Who the hell is your new sweetie?” I asked. I glanced at my watch. I wasn’t checking the time, I was checking to see what day of the week it was. My personal calendar at that time held two dates, today and tomorrow. To everyone else it was Friday evening.

“You are, you stupid shit! After all, whadda ya think I am, some kinda whore or something?”

I didn’t dare touch that one with a ten-foot pole. Without a single word, I simply walked into her kitchen, grabbed bottle of wine and climbed back into bed.

And, yes, she spent the hundred bucks that weekend. She took me out Saturday night. A pretty good movie and a great dinner.

Katie and I had a relationship of sorts for a couple of months that hit it’s peak almost immediately and tapered off quickly. The chemistry that makes long term relationships just wasn’t there. Shortly after the relationship was over, I was astonished and very much relieved to discover that out basic friendship had actually improved.

Usually when a relationship splits, it splits completely. After the split we rode each others cases loud, and playfully nasty. We publicly never had a civil word to say to each other.

Privately, things were different. After Houseboat Bob killed himself that spring , she knew I was pretty upset because I had just spent the day with his bereaved father. She came to where I was living with an overnight bag and a thick flannel nightie, and climbed into my bed and held me and listened to me alternately cry and ramble on about a lost pal and dealing with a distraught father. She held me all night.

The next day, she and I had another nasty good natured spat, and we were both quite vicious. Quite a few people listened, and found it to be very entertaining.

Years later, when my friend drove seven hours one way to tell me about Blaine and return the Zippo lighter, he asked me about Katie. I told him I had lost touch with her shortly after I left the Rock. (to locals, Kodiak Island is known as ‘the rock’) He told me that she was still there, and that the locals still occasionally talk about the way she and I got along after we broke up.

“We miss it. It was like listening to Danny DiVito and Rhea Pearlman having breakfast with their kids,” he said.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
The Bering Sea, aboard a 98 foot Bender, a Challenger series semi-custom crab boat, an older model that has seen quite some use. We have left port singing a very cynical song to the tune of an old Janis Joplin tune:

Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Marco…crab …boat;
My friends all sail Benders, They don’t stay afloat…..

It is now the dead of winter, and a couple weeks before Katie and I got together.

It is also a pretty god time to give you some particulars: In the late ‘70s, the Crab fishery exploded. There was money to be made there, a lot of money. The shipyards were making boats left and right. Marco, a Seattle based outfit made pretty good, stable boats that were well designed for the Bering Sea. In Alabama, Bender, who started off as a welding and machine shop, was marketing a fairly inexpensive model, 98 feet and designed along the lines of the Gulf shrimpers. It was a pretty seakindly boat, well made, but with a few inherent design flaws.

The boat could not carry enough ice on her superstructure to get a case of beer cold, nor could it carry many crab pots on deck in heavy seas. These boats generally went to sea with de-icing equipment known as “Louisville Sluggers”, meaning garden variety baseball bats. A scared deckhand with a baseball bat can remove a lot of ice, but several fishermen were lost by being swept over the side by heavy seas.

Several of these Benders “turned turtle” and were lost, generally with all hands, before the design flaw was later corrected by retroactively adding sponsons, void areas that added to the stability. But that was later…….

By the early to mid 80s, the crab fleet was getting pretty overcapitalized, the seasons were short, and every second spent working the gear counted. Workdays were long, thirty hour days were normal, forty and forty-eight hour days were commonplace, and seventy-two hour workdays were not unheard of.

Shortening the length of the seasons meant that skippers would have to work in rougher weather. Boat payments still had to be made. And skippers took pretty hellacious chances. Working gear in twenty-foot seas became commonplace.
Too commonplace…..

The fishermen evolved, too. They were independent, rugged, devil may care characters that were tough and too often pretty wild. Many had nothing to lose. Many would drink like wild men, many would constantly drug themselves to a stupor. Then they would go back to sea sick as dogs and work the poisons out of their systems. They took hellacious chances, constantly risked it all. That they could survive such rigors and binges is a monumental tribute to a thing called youthful, rude good health!

It is interesting to note that after I left Kodiak, the Navy opened a base up there for training their SEAL teams in cold weather operations, they made it clear to the SEAL team members that they were to leave the fishermen alone! To placate SEAL egos, they told them that they’d probably win the scuffle, but they’d probably get pretty busted up in the process.

Besides, the Navy had a lot better things to do with it’s money than spend it patching up busted up SEALs. An injured SEAL is non-operational.

In short, the fishermen were not typical, old school fishermen, but were highly trained athletes, bred for endurance. Skippers would often fire a deckhand on their thirty-fifth birthday simply for being too damned old.

I’ll reenter the story here by giving you a rundown on the present whereabouts of the crew:

Blaine: Dead. Skiff accident in New Jersey.
Larry: The skipper. Dead. Went down with the boat a couple of years after I got off it and moved away.
Guy: Deckhand. Dead. Killed with Larry.
Bill: Crippled up with arthritis. Lives in the Cascades. Does odd jobs.
Me: I’m telling the tale, ain’t I?

The seas were running about twenty feet when we decided to call it a day, and besides, we were toast after about thirty-six hours. Still, running gear in twenties was pretty commonplace. The seas were expected to get a hell of a lot worse before they got any better. Bill and I took the first wheel watch. Usually one guy takes it, but things were pretty snotty and Blake wanted two guys in the wheelhouse. Besides, Bill and I were a pretty good team. We’d swap off wheel duties and the other guy did errands, got things and lit cigarettes for the guy at the wheel in addition to keeping his eyes peeled. His main duty was to keep the guy on the wheel on his toes.

Incidentally, the flare of a match can ruin night vision for almost half an hour. The night lights in the wheel house were both dim and red to preserve night vision.

Things grew worse by the hour, and the seas grew to about thirty or more and it got cold. We were starting to make clear ice, which meant little. But the seas quickly grew and the clear ice rapidly started to turn into rime ice and started to build up fast.

I was on the wheel at the time and I looked at Bill. Not a word was spoken. He went below and woke up Guy and Blaine and kicked the skipper’s bunk. The boat started to handle a little sluggish.

Blake was like a cat. He was in the wheelhouse in a flash, and took one look at what was going on. Blaine and Guy didn’t have to be told what to do. They suited up and broke out the de-icing gear and headed out on deck. Larry ran below and brought up a case of Louisville Sluggers, took one and turned on the back deck intercom. He went below and grabbed his raingear, returned and gave us orders: Both of us were to stay where we were.

“Both?”

“ Yeah, the pair of you!”

I gave the wheel to Bill because he was a better boat handler than I was. Besides, he was bobbing around a bit with nervous energy. I could tell. He needed something to do. I did, too, but I didn’t know it at the time. Outside, the other three were gaining ground, or at least holding their own. The hours since we had racked out were mounting up. The other guys had gotten about three hours sleep, which was enough.

The reflection of Bill’s face in the wheelhouse glass told me that he was dog-tired, and I’m sure he saw the same in me. I got on the PA and argued that I was more good out on deck than here and Larry relented. My next couple hours were spent on deck busting ice. About two a.m., Larry sent us in. We were ahead of the game, and the seas were taking a bit of a break. Besides, the ice wasn’t building anymore. I figure that maybe it had gotten a bit warmer. We thought the worst was over, but we were wrong.

Ten minutes later, we were hit by a rogue wave, and the whole boat shuddered. Bill later told us that it was a miracle that we had not lost our windows. I went back to the wheelhouse, Blaine went below to tend to the engine room and refill the day tank. We knew that if the main quit, we’d probably die. I saw the fear working itself out of Bill’s body, I could tell because he was bouncing and really getting into steering. Guy started putting things away and making something to eat, which wasn’t too bright of a thing to do with the way the boat was bouncing around.

Curses and falling pots and pans could be heard. This failed to stimulate my appetite. Guy was incompetent in the galley. Blaine once said that Guy could fuck up a can of green beans. Blaine was right. A couple days earlier, Guy tried to open a can with an old-fashioned punch type opener and wound up with green beans all over the deck.

Wham! Another rogue! Suddenly the fear that I had held for the past several hours manifested itself. Here I was as steady as a rock, grinning like a Cheshire cat, when all of a sudden the fear I had slaked off came through to me. It had gone into my body. My colon was starting to spasm.

One of the windows had almost popped out, it was leaking, so I hammered it in with my fist until it was back in place. I grabbed a box of Kleenex and a five-gallon pail some wag had labeled ‘Puke Pail’, tore off the lid, dropped my pants and sat on the bucket. My sphincter exploded!

The entire wheelhouse became fouled with an odor that I thought the human body was totally incapable of producing. All the poisons of fear had just exited my body, and the stench was overwhelming.

Bill didn’t bat an eye. He just stayed on the wheel.

A few seconds later, I exploded again. This time the stench was worse, but I knew the fear was out of my body. I wiped myself, pulled up my pants and slammed the lid down on the pail and returned it to the corner and bungeed it in tight. A fetid, vile stink hung in the air.
Larry opened the lower hatch and started up to the wheelhouse.

“Beat it!” ordered Bill.

“What’s going on…..”

“Just get the fuck outta here and give us some Goddam privacy, will Ya?”

Larry went below. He was a damned good skipper, and knew when to leave well enough alone. Most skippers lacked the social grace to simply go away. Most would have popped off with some big ego lecture about how this is MY boat, and so forth. Not that Larry wasn’t an in-charge skipper, he just had some compassion and knew how to keep his ego in check.

Bill grinned. “That was the aroma of fear, if ever I smelled it. It’s gonna take at least an hour for this place to air out. Started seeing mermaids yet?” He was referring to the hallucinations that come with lack of sleep. Most of had had them many times as fishermen. I suppose the Indians call them ‘visions’, although many Indian visions were drug induced. My most common hallucination was pink and purple dinosaurs. Brontosaurus Rex.

“No,” I chuckled. “Wonder if Blaine has seen his horses yet.” Blaine always saw a horse ride across the wavetops when the hallucinations hit him. When that happened, he’d get shaky for a few minutes until he got over it.

“He got some sleep, remember?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking out the window. The one I had just hammered in. I was on lookout again. I lit Bill a cigarette and handed it to him. He took it and inhaled. It helped make the odor go away.

Outside, it was nasty, and it looked like it was nearing it’s peak. I stared into the blackness and say the reflection if Bill and his cigarette. Then I saw her.

I saw the Whore of Death.

I didn’t flinch. I looked carefully. There she was. I looked at her, checked her out for a good thirty seconds. Suddenly, I felt a painful erection. It actually hurt. I stopped checking her out and shifted my eyes. For the next thirty seconds or more I stared her straight in the eye. My loins still ached.

“You want me?” I said aloud.

She nodded.

My eyes locked into hers. I stared for quite a while. Then I spoke. “You can murder me, rape me, or take me by force anytime you want. But you can NOT seduce me!”

She smiled, the look of a seductress that knew she could have me no matter how I protested. To her my protests were nothing more than pro forma. She looked entertained that I’d protest at all. I stared hard into her made up eyes. Under her false eyelashes, her eyes were hard.

“Besides, you’re Mother Nature in another form. I know who you are and what you want!”

She paled before my eyes, turned as white as a sheet.

“Beat it, Whore,” I said. “Be gone!”

And she vanished. Seconds later, I went soft.

A few seconds later, I turned to Bill.

“What was that all about,” he asked.

I casually told him that I had been visited by the Whore of Death. Bill paled, and I explained that she was gone. Bill stayed a chalky white for several seconds. I casually lit him a smoke. The day was breaking through, and we were no longer steering in the dark.

“Don’t ask, I don’t know why I know this. Just listen. There will be one more big wave, and this storm is going go blow itself out. I just know this. By the time we wake up, we’ll be working the gear again.” I said.

Sure enough, a couple of minutes there was a huge swell, but we changed course to avoid the worst of it, firewalled the throttle, rode it to the top, chopped power, and surfed down the back of it, throwing spray all over.

“That son-of-a- bitch would have killed us,” said Bill.

Larry came up into the wheelhouse.

“It stinks in here,” he said, looking at me. “Something crawl up your ass and die?”

Bill looked at Larry. “You got it, Larry,” he said. “I’m outta here.”

As Larry took the helm, I looked at him. “As skipper of this stalwart vessel, you are a leader of men. Right now you don’t have any men left,” I said. Larry looked at me and shook his head with a perplexed look on his face. Then he snickered.

“Yeah, really,” he said. “You two look like hell.”

Bill grabbed his empty coffee cup, opened a locker, grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured about an inch and a half into the cup. The liquor would put him to sleep in seconds. Sometimes a guy could be too tired to sleep, and a medicinal shot or two would take the edge off enough to do the trick.

I grabbed the ‘Puke pail’ and the pair of us headed below. I made a mental note
not to trip on the cup, which I knew would wind up on the deck next to our bunks. Bill headed into the stateroom we shared, and I went out onto the shelter deck to clean the pail with a fire hose. I cleaned it and filled it 1/3 full of water, went back to the wheelhouse to replace it.

When I got to the rack, Bill was out cold.

To this day I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken a good shot before bed and passed out. I would have avoided a lot of mental turmoil, yet I would not know what I know today.

I climbed into my rack and stared at the overhead and ran the last couple hours back through my head. The whole thing was surreal.

First, I had looked the Whore of Death straight in the eye and not flinched.

Second, I had not let my fear overwhelm me. I had managed it and kept my sense of balance. I could take pride in these two things.

Third, I knew Bill and I now shared a special bond. We had a special respect for one another that would last for life. Neither of us would ever say a word to anyone else about the events that had taken place.

Fourth, I knew that I had been right chasing her off. That bitch was trying to seduce me and take both my life and my very soul. Had I given in, she would have taken me, and most likely, the whole crew. I wasn’t so much worried about MY life, as I was the lives of my shipmates. Still, the thought of spending eternity chasing her scared the hell out of me. And chase her, I would have, like many lost souls.

Fifth, and this scared me, I knew that the client book I had that had been given to me by the hooker I had taken to midnight mass held more power that I had ever imagined. Most of the names in it were fairly normal people. Many were single, some were married man that had strayed from the marriage bed for a fling, or some reason or another. But some were people that were trying to satisfy some deep rooted thing that was an aching in their souls.

This latter would willingly kill me in front of a thousand people and spend the rest of their lives in prison rather than have to publicly face themselves. I decided to do two things: I would still keep the client book, but I was going to ship it out of Kodiak. I eventually did this, and later I destroyed it.

I realized that I now knew too much. I was dangerous.

I wanted to sleep now, but it would not come. I found I wanted to look at The Whore of death again. I brought her back into my mind. I didn’t was to see her eyes, I just wanted to put her into my mind for future reference.
At this point, the erection I had experienced in the wheelhouse earlier returned. It strained against my long johns.

The Whore of Death was a tall woman, a couple inches taller than me. She was ageless, but looked around forty. She didn’t have a bikini figure, nor a Playboy model look about her, nor was she stocky like a corn-fed farm girl. Her hips were a bit wider than the model types, and she was fairly well busted, but not top-heavy. Far from the ideal figure Hollywood shoves down our throats, I can describe her body as being utilitarian and practical. The type that can just about keep on keeping on forever. One thing was for certain though: She had stolen her legs from Tina Turner. They were powerful.

Her face and skin were nothing remarkable, either. Her skin was neither teenager tight, nor old age wrinkly, but had somewhat of a leathery appearance that comes from too much time in the wind and sun, and she had a quite few stretch marks on her breasts, abdomen and hips, as if she had given birth several times.

It was quite some time later when I figured out where all the stretch marks came from: She had given birth to every single natural disaster that had ever occurred on the face of the planet!

What made her so damned attractive was a total animal magnetism that defined total carnality. A thing well beyond the carnality of the flesh, a carnality that went deep into the soul. It was fearful, and a man that tied himself up with her once would be doomed to spend the rest of eternity trying to be with her again. In the pursuit of her, he would give up everything and become a shell of a human, lost forever.

Indeed, I was glad to have sent her away when she appeared in the wheelhouse.

Another thing was certain: This was going to be my last winter fishing trip---ever! I was going to get off the boat as soon as the season was over, at least until well into spring.

I blocked her out of my mind, but my erection wouldn’t go away. I needed sleep, and contemplated going to the wheelhouse for a stiff drink to knock myself out, but the erection wouldn’t go away and I really didn’t want to wander up into the wheelhouse with an erection.

I reached into my long johns and touched myself. Instantly I exploded and before the throes of a very powerful orgasm were over, I was dead to the world in a deep sleep.

I woke to Bill rustling around, and looked out the porthole. The seas were down, sixes and eights and no whitecaps. The wind had died out. I looked at Bill.

“They’re over there, Bill,” I said, pointing to his pants.

“You asshole,” he laughed. It was a reference to the time we had been in a rush and had both tried to put on the same pair of pants a la Laurel and Hardy several trips ago.

We got dressed and went out into the galley. Blaine was there looking pretty chipper. He had probably sacked out on the settee.

For the first time since I’ve known him, Bill announced that he was starving. He was always a coffee and cigarette man. Everyone gaped. Even Larry as he walked into the galley. Seeing Larry in the galley was a good sign because it meant that Guy was at the helm. Larry never left Guy steering unless things were pretty mild.

“What happened up there, last night?” Larry asked Bill. His voice had a cutting edge to it.

“Nothing that had anything to do with the safe operation of the vessel,” answered Bill, in a formal voice.
Blaine glanced at me, but the look I gave him told him that nothing was ever going to come from my lips. He nodded, and never asked me again. He knew better.

“Are you positive?”

“Yes.”

“I will take you at your word.” Larry went up into the wheelhouse and Guy came down.

“One a you guys shit your pants up there?” He asked. “The wheelhouse sorta smelled pretty bad when we got up there last night.”

Blaine surprised us all. He grabbed Guy and bounced him against a bulkhead a couple of times. Bill and I looked at each other and laughed. Then Blaine backhanded Guy a couple times. More laughter. Guy broke loose and ran up to the
wheelhouse.

Larry came down a minute or so later. He was carrying a bottle of cognac, and poured the three of us a cup of coffee and added a tablespoon or two to each of the cups.

“Well, Boys, time for our morning booze,” he said.

More laughter. The cognac he added was not enough to effect us in any was, but it sure gave the coffee a wonderful aroma.

Blaine cooked up a pretty damned good breakfast, and we ate like hogs. Fifty minutes later we were working the gear, and would do so for the next few days until the season ended. We made pretty good money, too

Further adventures in deranged behavior:

I got off the boat as planned, and in June got back on. We fished black cod and halibut and I made a bunch of money. I could afford to take almost a year off, and in the middle of August, took my personal sailboat off for a long cruise down the inside passage. I was sailing nearly a year before the money ran out, and wound up having an interesting time for quite a while. It’s another story. A book, really.

During the Gulf of Alaska crossing, I hit a pretty good storm and saw the Whore of Death again. She announced that she had something for me and vanished. When I went below, I saw my father, who had died a few years before. He was funny, and left me in good spirits. I still miss him. He was a real character.

Bill got off in August when I did, and went to the Cascades to build himself a home on some land he had there, returning to fish as he needed money.

Guy took his money and took some woman to Hawaii. He was gone three days, returned pretty upset that she had left him after he had tossed her into the pool. We felt bad for him until a couple months later when the woman came back to town. Seems he HAD thrown her into the pool, all right. From a third story balcony! After that, no female would have anything to do with him, even the hookers. He left town, but returned in time to be rehired and later killed when Larry lost the boat.

Blaine went back to Jersey, where he met his fate.

I never did return to winter fishing.

#



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

SOmething for you from a couple winters ago

I posted a poll a while back asking you guys if I ought to get a snap brim cap, a fifty mission ‘crush’ or a leather helmet and goggles for driving the Miata in.

Actually, I’ll probably drive it bareheaded, but I have an invite to go for a ride in a Stearman when the weather breaks and I’ll be damned if I’m going for a once in a lifetime flight in anything but a helmet and goggles.

So I put on my flight jacket and drove out to Ohio to buy me a leather helmet and goggles. The place was having a special. Buy both and they throw in a scarf. Cool.

It was as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass bra when I left the store, so I left the regalia on and hopped into my pickup and headed home. I left the stuff on and promptly forgot about it as I drove along the Ohio Turnpike. After a while, I wanted a cup of Joe, so I pulled into a rest stop. I was almost into the restaurant area when I realized that I was still wearing a silk scarf, helmet and goggles, but it was so cold I said ‘The hell with it’ and walked in.

I was in the McDuck line when a trio, obviously three generations by the family resemblance fell in behind me.

The teenaged boy, about sixteen or so, asked his dad "What’s with him," looking at my outfit. I couldn’t help myself. I turned and introduced myself.

"Crash Murphy," I said. "I’m one of the last of the Old School stick and rudder men. Headed to New York City to guard the Empire State Building. That idiot Robert Denhart the third pulled another one of them oversized apes offa Skull Island and he’s gonna show it. They pulled me out of retirement to keep the Empire State Building safe. Best piece of flying I ever did was back in ’33 the first time a gorilla busted loose."

"They don’t have screamers like Faye Wray anymore, either," I added. "I had a radial engine roaring and 4 thirty caliber machine guns going off and I could STILL hear her above it all."

The father smirked, but the look the grandfather gave me was truly devilish. The kid didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t scared, nor really too uncomfortable. Still, he decided to pass me off to someone else.

"My grandfather flew fighters during WW2," said the kid.

"What was his name?" I asked.

"George Bailey," said the kid.

"I taught a George Bailey to fly back in ’43," I replied.

"It was ’42," interrupted the old man. "Crash, is that really you? I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!" He looked at his grandson. "He’s the guy that taught me to fly during the war," he explained.

The look on the kid’s face was priceless. His eyes were as round as saucers and his lower jaw was resting on his waist. At least until he saw the look on the faces of his grandfather and I. Then he turned real red. He had just been had by a couple of pros and knew it. He turned beet red.

The father chuckled, Gramps and I smirked. The father had actually stepped aside. He was enjoying the show.

One look at George Bailey and I knew he was probably something like a very successful used car salesman. He was clear eyed and as sharp as a tack.

"You look good, George," I said. "Last time I saw you, you were as skinny as this youngster is. You’ve grown downright handsome in your middle age."

"You, too, Crash. How did you do it?"

"I used to tell you young guys not to drink that cheap whiskey," I said. "But you never listened to me. I told you to drink good whiskey off of the top shelf, and plenty of it."

"I remember," said George Bailey. He turned to his son. "Do we still have any of that good Bourbon left that Jimmy gave you last Christmas?"

"Sure," answered the son.

"Good. I’m going to have me a drink of that when we get home," said George Bailey.

"But dad," said the son.

"Heck, I might have two."

"But, dad…"

"I might even have six or eight if you don’t stop telling me what to do, Son. I’m still your father!"

The clerk called "Next!" so I went up and ordered my coffee and bid them a hasty adios.

As I was leaving, I heard the kid ask his father and grandfather who the hell I was. I heard George Bailey tell him "A friend."

Then George Bailey turned to his son. "I really am going to have that drink," he said.

I laughed all the way to my pickupmy other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Louie and I Man the fighting tops.

Louie and I were in our third year of Cub Scouts and the fall tour sponsored my the military was a visit to the USS Constitution, ‘Old Ironsides’, located in Charleston, Mass.

This was not really as exciting as it sounds. My aunt had taken me to see ‘Old Ironsides’a few months earlier during the early part of the summer when my mother was in the hospital. My aunt was a new schoolteacher and decided her nephews needed some ‘cult-chah’ and dragged my kid brother and I through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (booooring), the Boston Science Museum (pretty neat) and to keep our interests up, we went to see Old Ironsides The Navy’s ‘canned tour’ was pretty good, and they had let my brother and I play with the smashers, the heavy 32 pound guns.

Still, I wasn’t going to miss out on a trip with the guys, so I went. Louie and I teamed up again, as usual.

This was a great deal. Mrs. Broomstick was no longer our Den Mother, Mrs. Lewis was ands she was pretty good in that she didn’t over mother us and raise hell over what we ate. She had several kids of her own, mostly older, and she had a lot of things figured out. She figured out that simply feeding us was good enough and that there were better things to raise hell about than a couple of lousy peas left on the dinner plate.

One other thing she had figured out is that Dr. Spock was an idiot.

I heard her tell my mother that once. She raised her kids the old fashioned way. She used common sense.

‘Mother’ Davis was Cub master. This was about three or four years before we started calling him ‘Mother’. Back then he was simply Bob Davis to adults or Mr. Davis to us kids. A couple years later, he became a Boy Scout leader where he earned the nickname ‘Mother Davis’.

Mr. Davis, I later learned had been a Navy veteran of WW2 and his battle station on an Attack Transport was the helm. During Okinawa, he had spent a hellish 70 hour-long stint at the wheel dodging Kamikazes. He was pretty proud that ‘his’ Marines had gotten into Okinawa all right. I learned this later in Boy Scouts.

He was also sometimes a real character with a real deadpan sense of humor.

At the Pack meeting, he explained that we were going on the tour with another Pack from across town. This was pretty neat because we knew most of the guys in the other Pack from school.

Two Packs of Cub scouts, almost 100 kids were lined up and Mr. Davis got in front of all of us and carefully explained that Constitution was a bona fide Naval vessel and that we were to show her some respect. We were supposed to board her properly and demonstrated the proper way to board.

We started up, following Mr. Davis. He was wearing his old Navy cap.

When he got to the top, he faced the Officer of the deck and saluted.

"Former 1st Class Petty Officer Davis requests permission to board, Sir," he said.

"Granted."

Mr. Davis faced aft and saluted the colors.

Then he stood next to the Officer and watched almost a hundred Cub Scouts board.

"Cub Scout Johnny Smith requests permission to board, Sir," giving the two fingered Cub Scout salute.

The officer of the deck returned the salute, and the Cub Scout faced aft and saluted the colors.

Mr. Davis watched the scene repeat itself almost a hundred times with a big self-satisfied look on his face. The poor officer of the deck must have worn out his arm returning all the salutes, but he did, returning every single one crisply.

Another officer, one with oak leaves on his collar, watched and chuckled at the hapless officer of the day. So did a Chief. Louie and I knew what Chiefs were from out trip to Wasp, two years earlier.

"Hey, Chief," I asked. "You let the captain run the boat?"

Mr. Davis laughed out loud, the Chief grinned appreciatively and the officer with the oak leaves on his collar points smirked.

"The Chief does a pretty good job of keeping an eye on me," he said.

They all laughed.

"I like you, kid," said the Chief.

They laughed again.

After the last of us boarded, the tour started.

The Navy was smart, figuring that no human should be forced to give a tour of any type to 100 children of Cub Scout age, split us into a couple of groups. Anything over one thousand, two hundred and thirty four questions in a two-hour period was enough for anyone. The two packs were split up, which was a pretty good deal, considering we got to pal around with other guys we knew, but shared Cub Scouting in common.

Seeing that I had been through the tour and had briefed Louie, we plotted out escape.

We didn’t want to be sailors. We wanted to be Marines.

Mrs. Lewis had shown us a picture book about Constitution at our Den meeting. One of the pictures was a picture of US Marines on the fighting tops. They were shooting muskets at the British from a platform halfway up the masts. We asked her about what the guys there were doing. She read us the cutline.

‘Marines man the fighting tops during a battle in 1814’, read the cutline.

The mentality of being a basic rifleman is something that someone is born with, or one does not have it. Louie and I must have had it at the time. The picture fired our imaginations.

We both knew where our spiritual battle stations were.

Anyway, we sneaked out of the tour and hid near the officer of the day. Sometimes the best place to hide is in the lion’s mouth.

"Wait until he’s talking to a pretty lady," said Louie.

We waited. Shortly thereafter, a woman from the Baltimore area showed up and came up the gangway. She had to be from Baltimore because she had a set of breastworks that looked like they came from Fort McHenry.

While the officer of the deck was busy with her, Louie and I interrupted.

"Permission to man our battle stations," I asked, giving the Cub Scout salute.

"Granted," snapped the officer, returning our salutes.

Our little asses were now covered!

John Paul Jones would have marveled. The Gunnery Sergeant of Bon Homme Richard would have been in tears of joy seeing the speed the ‘tops were manned!

We did not climb the rigging, nor did we scale the mast.

No way in hell. There is a proper nautical term for what happened next.
Louie and I swarmed up the ratlines, and in record time, too.

Seconds later, two ten-year-old wannabe Marines were on the fighting tops of the forward mast. How we got up there without being caught is still, forty-two years later, beyond me.

Still, we were there.

We sat there, out of sight and enjoyed the view.

Then we did sort of a dumb thing. We looked down.

We were a bit scared. The Officer of the Deck looked like a small dot from there. Slowly we relaxed, and the inevitable happened. We started fucking around, which is to be expected of ten year-old boys.

It wasn’t long before one of us did something stupid like shout "Land, Ho!" or something dumb like that. It wasn’t much, but it didn’t take much, either.

That’s when the shit hit the fan. Chaos reigned on the main deck. Orders were being barked and suddenly we saw a sailor start up the ratlines toward us. He was coming up the starboard side. At a glance, we saw that all the action going on below was on the starboard side.

So Louie and I started down the port side ratlines as fast as we could. I guess we figured that if we could hit the deck running, that we could scurry below and mix in with another group of Cub Scouts. They’d probably give up if we did that.

We were pretty close to the deck when we both saw that there were people headed toward us to head us off, so when we were pretty close to the deck, we both jumped.

Busted!

I landed in the arms of a pretty beefy Chief. The grip he held me in let me know that I wasn’t going anywhere.

The officer with the oak leaves caught Louie and they both fell in a heap. Louie bounced up like a cat and took off like a shot. He almost made it, but was nailed cold by a sailor that scooped him up like a sack and returned him to the Skipper, the Chief and I.

"What were you doing up there," asked the Captain.

"Me and Louie are going to be Marines when we get bigger," I said. "We were just manning our battle stations."
"We had permission," added Louie.

"Who gave you permission?" asked the Skipper.

"He did," we both said, pointing at the Officer of the Deck. "He said we could man our battle stations!"

"Mister," said the Skipper. "Do you have any children?"

"No, Sir"

"When you have children, you’ll learn."

"Yes, Sir." He looked embarrassed.

The Skipper and the Chief exchanged looks. They seemed somewhat amused. But were trying to hide it.

"I’m glad I have girls," said the skipper.

"Hell, Sir," said the Chief. "In a couple of years, you’ll gladly trade stuff like this when the girls discover boys and you find a dozen young men outside their window baying like hounds."

The Skipper turned ashen.

"That’ll be enough of that, Chief. But I do take your point."

We got off pretty easily, with a lecture of sorts. The skipper also told us that we couldn’t do Marine things until we were actually old enough to be Marines.

"We figured that if we learn to do Marine things now, we’d make stripes faster when we went in," said Louie.

"You two will do OK just the way you are," said the Chief.

The Skipper and the Chief were both kind men and they escorted us back to the tour.

"Why did you guys start running? Asked the Skipper.

"Because you were chasing us," I answered.

The Chief actually laughed outright.

"Yeah," said Louie. "And if we were caught, we’re supposed to try and escape."

"You two will make pretty good Marines," said the Chief.

It was well over thirty years before I found out why we never caught hell for this from Mr. Davis or Mrs. Lewis. I found out from ‘Mother’ Davis a couple years before he died.

He told me that he figured that two ten year old boys that had been caught raising hell by a Navy Chief had gotten whole lot more of a punishment than they deserved.



edited to add, these days it's pretty funny telling Marines that 'When I was a whole lot younger than you, I was manning the 'tops on Old Ironsides!'



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Happy St Patrick's Day

Well, that idiot Santorum is doing a great job of talking himself out of the Oval office again. He's talking about tearing up the first amendment with a so-called war on pornography among other things.

He's already made it clear that he wants to govern the reproductive systems of women and tell them that they have to have children if they want to have sex.

What he seems to be promising us is that if he gets elected he is going to spending most of his time trying to make sure that the government will be strictly enforcing the laws of the Catholic church and regulating behavior of consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes.

None of this whatsoever is any business of the government.
The imbecile should simply be telling us how he is going to get the country back on their feet and working again.

If he would simply realize that government has no place in our private lives and start worrying about how to get the country off of its ass and up and working again he would be a shoo-in.

While I will not vote for Barack Obama under any circumstances, I will not vote for anyone that wants to take my freedom away.

If Santorum gets the nod I will be in the middle of a dileimma. I very well may not go to the polls for the first time in my adult life.
Why bother?

It only serves to encourage them.
---------------------------------------------
Spring is starting to show its head and I have a feeling that this is going to be a long summer full of sultry nights and you know what that means when the Grandfather's Club meets on my back porch.
We have a snort together and sometimes even two and plot against the government and their high-handedness. Our big thing is to make sure that the grandchildren get a real taste of true American freedom.

I think that this summer we are going to illegally and criminally take the grandchildren out for a ride through farm country in the back of a pickup truck and endanger their lives a little more often than we did last summer.

After we commit this reckless crime against humanity we retire to the back porch and strike yet ANOTHER blow for liberty. We have a drink of bourbon.
--------------------------------------------

Today is St. Patrick's Day and if I was home I would put my yarmulke on and head straight on down to the local Jewish deli for a corned beef on rye and a side of slaw because the way the Irish serve corned beef and cabbage is an abomination.

Yesterday someone came along and tried to ruin it by making references to the Catholic church and calling it a fariy tale. He ought to have his ass kicked for trying to ruin a perfectly good holiday for the rest of us that use it as an excuse to eat corned beef and suck down a Guiness or two.

Saint Patrick supposidly chased all the snakes out of Ireland. I wish he would come to this country and do something close here. He could run the snakes out of this country. He could leave all the legless creatures that slither on the ground but it sure would be nice to wake up and find Washington DC with a pretty good sized portion of the population gone.
___________________________

Someone ran a poll a while back over who would emerge as victor in a fight between Chuck Norris and the Most Interesting Man in the World.

While I will not go so far as to even venture a guess as to who would emerge victorious in such a bout, I do firmly believe that watching such a fight would prove to be.........................interesting.
　
　
　

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Today is a blah day.

I really do not have a whole lot to say for a change but I have pretty good news.

No, I did not save a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to GEICO.

I got in touch with my nephew last night and he is going to pay me a visit and hang out for a few days. That is pretty important to me because he is going to get a little responsibility dumped on him when he gets here.

One of the things that I want to get taken care of while I am alive and in one piece is what is to be done with me after I cease to exist.

He's getting that little chore dumped on him. It will be his job to see that the box containing my remains is turned over to the United States Navy for burial at sea.

I can imagine how that's going to work out and I can see a circus in the making but he's the guy for the job.

I suppose if the pickup I own still runs he can save a few bucks by throwing the box in the back and heading off to Norfolk to deliver the body. He's smart enough to tie the load down and cover it with a tarp.

Then again maybe I should find someone a little less responsible for the job as it would be a lot more fun to look down from the heavens and watch a 3 ring circus as the box falls out of the pickup while going up a hill. I can see it now. A couple of drunks trying to drag the box back and reload it on the pickup on the Pennsylvania turnpike as a trooper drives up and beer cans roll out of the bed.

Or pulling up to the base entrance with a pickup full of beer cans and a casket in the bed.

"May I help you," asks a spiffy sailor.

"Yeah. I got my Uncle Pic in the back here and I want to take him to where you bury people at sea."

"Hmmm," says the sailor. "I gotta inspect this vehicle."

"OK, but Uncle Pic's gettin' kinda ripe and I was hoping to get him into a refrigerator before he starts too stinky. Ya might really want to freeze him. The pizza and six-pack he had before he died really tore his ass up."

He exits the vehicle and there is the ringing noise of an empty Jameson's bottle hitting the pavement.

Still, I look forward to seeing my nephew because he is no longer a damned kid. He is a good man and I respect him. I have a lot of things to do before he arrives.

It'll be a pretty good three or four days with him hanging out and doing dopey guy things.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

One of my shipmates live on a pretty nice boat.

He bought it for peanuts and probably got what he originally paid for. It wasn't much of a boat when he bought it but after a lot of sweat equity is is now a pretty fine yacht. There was a lot of sweat and, over time, a pretty good chunk of change he coughed up to put the vessel together.

The boat has twin diesels and a pretty good sized fuel tank and uses fuel at the rate that you would expect of a yacht of that size. At current fuel prices that is about $25/hour. That comes to about $600/day.

Of course, he doesn't take it out a whole lot, partly because of that and partly because he simply put it together to live on and partly to resell.

He does this as a way of making a few extra bucks and saving a few extra bucks because slip space is cheaper than renting an apartment. I suppose to a certain extent he is playing 'flip this boat'.

He reports to me that an awful lot of people generously offer him, say, a bottle of wine or a case of beer to either go for a boat ride or to take them fishing. He also reports that when he points out that at 6 gallons of diesel an hour for an 8 hour fishing trip is 48 gallons of diesel at about $3.75 a pop comes to about $180 and when you add oil changes and other maintainence $200 really won't cover it.

Of course when he points this out to someone they seem to get a bit upset and think he is a jerk. He isn't.

He's just another working stiff that doesn't happen to have a few spare extra couple hundred bucks kicking around to piddle away and impress someone.

To a certain extent anyone that owns a pickup truck or a van runs into this sort of thing from time to time. They get asked by someone to help them move. Generally this really isn't a problem when the pickup owner agrees after being offered a tank of gas and a case of beer. DUI laws have pretty much quashed 'moving parties'.

An awful lot of people don't think. Fuel costs money. A case of beer which the skipper can not drink anyway while the vessel is underway really doesnt to start to begin to come close to compensate for what you are asking someone to do. Especially a case of beer that the passengers are going to drink themselves anyway.

We're talking about a fifty foot yacht here and not some dinky little jon boat with a 5 horse kicker stuck on the back.

Back when I lived on a 24'7" sailboat with a 9.9 horsepower Honda for auxillary power things were an awful lot different. If someone showed up with some beer or a jug or something I could easily afford to blow off a day and go sailing because it would only cost me a couple of cups of gasoline at about a buck or so a gallon to get me out of the harbor. The wind was free. I think to a certain extent that is still is because nobody has found a way to tax it yet, but I imagine someone will come along with a way.

There's an awful lot of difference between a 24'7" cruising sailboat and a 50 foot motor yacht, both in size and operating costs yet there are an awful lot of people that think that a bottle of wine will cover the operating costs of a 50 foot motor yacht.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

The killings in Afghanistan. Part 2

I started a thread on another website I frequent with a link to yesterday's post and as of 8 hours after I posted the opinions seemed to run for and against having the Staff Sergeant turned over to face Sharia law. They seemed to be roughly split into 3 opinions..

A few tried to compare it to the major that killed 13 in Texas but that was a case of a GI killing other GIs on a military post. That is clearly a case that is covered entirely by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

There were a couple people that said that trying the Staff Sergeant by the Afghani court system was barbaric. I do not doubt that one bit. Perhaps the Staff Sergeant should have thought of that before he perpetrated such a barbaric act himself.

A GI in a foriegn country to a certain extent is governed by local law. While on duty he is protected by the military and that is the way it is supposed to be. Inflicting casualties on the enemy is not considered to be a criminal act. That's what GIs do. They inflict casualties on the enemy.

What they do not do is leave firebases and the legal protection afforded by them and wander downtown and commit crimes. They do this at their own risk.

As for the three opinions I have had expressed over yesterday's post, they run about 1/3 expressing we ought to drag the Staff Sergeant back to the States for trial. Some of them stated that if we turned the Staff Sergeant over to Afghani authorities that they would be brutal. I have no problem with this. The murders were brutal.

He went into their town and murdered their people and I have no problem with them extracting justice by their rules.

Others expressed that by doing so it would make us look weak. I disagree. It would make us look fair and just. There's a difference.

A sense of justice is a strength and not a weakness.

Another school was in 100% agreement with my post.

There was also another school of thought and when I think about it it may not be a bad idea. The third school of thought is that we try the Staff Sergeant by courts-martial in country, expedite the appeals process and if he is convicted, execute him in Afghanistan.

I don't have a problem with the latter proposal at all.

The biggest thing is to make it clear to the people of Afghanistan that what the Staff Sergeant did will not be tolerated at all by the United States military.

To be honest with you I feel this way not because of some type of emotional sympathy for the Afghanis. I think that this is a necessary thing to do for the troops serving over there. The troops should know that anything that endangers them needlessly will be dealt with.

While we can't undo the damage the Staff Sergeant did, we can certainly make it clear that we do not tolorate this. That in itself will help make it clear to the Afghanis that the average GI doesn't go along with outright murder of civilians.

The Afghanis should be made well aware of this and the troops damned well deserve to know that anything endangering them needlessly will be dealt with immediately.
-----------------------------------------------------------
I just asked one of the troops what he thought ought to be done to the jerk and his reply was brief and to the point:

"Firing squad of US troops in the village square."

It should be noted the GI that said this is a paratrooper woth 5 tours under his belt.

I have no problem with that. It might even do a better job than simply turning him over to Afghan authorities. It would send a message to the Afghans that we don't tolerate that kind of behavior at all.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

I'd be surprised if this post doesn't get me a lot of crap

I didn't get the cattle prod I mentioned yesterday because I really didn't want to deal with some humorless boob.
　
Yesterday I read a story about a couple and their kid getting tossed off of an airplane because the kid wouldn't behave. Good call on the pilot's part. I support him 100%. There is no reason 175 people should be cooped up on an airplane with a kid that won't behave itself.


In other news, the troops are now most likely going to experience the Taliban increasing activity thanks to some Staff Sergeant going off and killing a bunch of civilians in Afghanistan. Of course, there is simply no reason for this whatsoever. The Staff Sergeant has just put a lot of GIs at risk and that is never a good thing. While the Staff Sergeant is being detained in safety the rest of our GIs will be at increased risk.

Of course, the Army will courts-martial him and if he is deemed mentally incompetent he will wind up in the screw factory for rethreading. If he isn't considered incompetent he will wind up in Leavenworth and probably have to spend the rest of his life in isolation because the GIs there will probably extract justice from him if he is not isolated.

Frankly, in this particular instance he has committed a civilian offense against the people of Afghanistan. He ought to be turned over to them and let him face Sharia law.

If a GI in, for example, Germany or South Korea committed a crime against local law by there he would most likely have to face criminal prosecution by the Germans or Koreans. I'm pretty sure that the German police have carted in more than one GI for getting drunk and tearing up a bar and taken him to court.

Turning this GI over to the Afghans would do several things. It probably wouldn't get the Taliban settled down but it would show the average Afghani that we don't tolorate that kind of behavior in this country and we don't tolorate our people behaving like that over there.

Over the years I have spoken with a number of professional GIs, both Army and Marine and almost to a man they have told me stories of little acts of kindness paying off in huge dividends.

"Don't go down that street today, Marines," said one kid to a Marine patrol. Sure enough the engineers located a pretty good sized IED a few hours later. Right down the street the kid steered the patrol clear of.

Betcha that won't happen as often after this incident. Innocent GIs are going to pay heavily for this act of cruel stupidity.

This does not mean that GIs are Kumbaya singers, either. They are not. Nor are they wild-eyed killers. They are professionals. They kill when they have to, without hesitation, compassion or remorse. It is just another part of their job.

Right now I believe we have the most professional military that we have ever had in history. They are to a man, volunteers. A large percentage are not still on their first enlistment. They are on professional status. Most of them have at least one deployment under their belt, and many of them have several deployments.

This also isn't another war where the young first enlistment privates and corporals constitute the overwhelming percentage of casualties.
If you look at the casualty reports there are an awful lot of officers and NCOs leading from the front and getting hit. This means to me that the professionals are not simply time servers. They are leading from the front where they belong.

It doesn't really matter if they are reservists or regulars, most of them have been overseas and gotten their hands dirty.

I'll bet there are not a whole lot of GIs out there that support the recent cowardly killings of all those civilians. It would be interesting to see how many GIs would be in favor of handing the Staff Sergeant over to Afghan authorities for trial and punishment.

An awful lot of keyboard commandos out there are going to try and tell me that I'm wrong here but I'd sure like to hear what the boots on the ground over there think. The man has disgraced his uniform, his service and himself. What is a whole lot worse is that it sounds like a lot of GIs are going to pay for these acts with arms, legs, sanity and their very lives.

I'd bet an awful lot of the troops would go along with throwing the Staff Sergeant to the wolves. I'll bet they don't condone that kind of behavior, either for a number of reasons, either moral, practical or both.

Then again I may very well find myself wrong with this post because it is going to take time before all the facts trickle in but this is what it looks like now.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

I now have 47 followers which is somewhat surprising

because it tells me that either there are 47 people in the world that want to read the grumblings of a 60 year old sailor or there are 47 people out there that are bored to tears and need something to do.

Either way it's pretty interesting realizing that 47 people are interested in what I have to say.

I suppose it is supposed to give me a big ego and I am expected to self-destruct and write something wierd...or at least wierder than some of my posts but I see no reason to.

If the blog has 47 followers or 47 million or none at all the show will still go on. I do this for my own sanity which has been only holding by a thread since Day One.

I got into hot water a fewe days ago with the eBay folks. Someone does not have a sense of humor.

I sent a question to someone selling a cattle prod asking them if they thought the cattle prod would be a good tool to use to get my grandchildren to eat their vegetables.

The seller emailed me back with "How could you even THINK of such a thing?"

"You don't know my grandchildren," I replied.

As I write this it occurs to me that I am somewhat surprised that in this age where spanking a kid is grounds for a trip to court that people DON'T use a cattle prod on a recaltricent kid. After all, they do not leave an incriminating mark.

I remember that time I got a pretty good poke from something electrical I was tinkering with as a kid. My father laughed when he saw I wasn't hurt and simply asked me if I had learned anything from the experience.

Today some parent would make a big to-do and blame the manufacturer for making a faulty product even though their kid had taken it apart when it was plugged in.

Incidentally I did learn from the poke I got as a kid. It made me a lot more careful in dealing with electricity. I learned to check things a little more carefully.

Then again I suppose I ought to be a little more caareful about dealing with sellers on eBay and asking them if cattle prods are good for dealing with wayward children because one of these days someone is going to get all worked up and raise some kind of hell with me.

Then again maybe dealing with some idiot that DOES get all worked up over nothing would make pretty good copy for this little blog.

Truth is being careful about stuff like that really isn't any fun.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Maybe I will have my pitcher taken outside the liberry

There are a couple of QSL bureaus out there that can be used to confirm contacts. The two that come to mind are eQSL.cc and LoTW. The latter is the one run by the American Radio Relay League, an organization of which I am not going to become a member until I have my eggs in one basket and can put in for my WAS certificate.

While the ARRL is the basic national organization for hams in the same way the NRA is the basic national organization for gun owners, they have an odd way of setting up their QSL bureau. It requires me to download their program and for an old goat like me it is a confusing set of hoops to jump through.

eQSL is a whole lot simpler, you simply log in and go at it. To have your credentials guarenteed all you have to do is send in a request for a post card or shoot them a copy of your license. It's a whole lot easier.

While I am still awaiting about 8 or 9 paper QSLs to come in and verify things. I will likely have to rework a couple of states but I am not going to join the ARRL until I can join and immediately apply for my WAS certificate. If the ARRL makes it difficult for me I will simply take 50 paper QSL cards to Kinkos/Staples/Office Max and have them made into a colorful poster and that will serve as proof as far as I am concerned.

After all, like a lot of things I am only doing this for myself. I really don't need someone else to approve of a whole lot of the things that I do.

There is another thing I am going to do pretty soon and that is make a picture to send to the people that run the Moose and Squirrel net.

The Moose and Squirrel net is a bit odd because most of their stuff is done on upper side band and most ham radio stuff 40 meters and below is done on lower side band. The reason for this is that the net is dedicated to Cold War era rigs and the PRC-320 sure is that.

They chose the cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle to name the net after and of course, the evil communist spies Boris Badinoff and Natasha as the imaginary forces of evil.

Time to break out the old army uniform and play a little dress up. It'll be a fun picture and I might post it here. Stick around. Props like the Jameson's bottle, the M-14 and a set of dentures atop the radio ought to make for a pretty good shot.

After the weather breaks a bit more I'll get on this.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

The weather has still been pretty good

but I am still wary because I have not felt the feeling of spring in the air yet.
Still, I have emptied out the nests out of my birdhouses and started to plan things for spring. I think I am going to plant another garden this year because it was fun.

It is fun listening to the neighbors get a hoot out of seeing a mean old salt out there gardening and the truth is that last spring and summer I had the prettiest garden on the entire street and the street I live on is pretty long.

It sure impressed the neighbors. The woman across the street told me that there were a lot of tongues wagging over the garden I grew last year.

There were a lot of people that seemed to have bad luck with theirs but mine took off like a shot and really went to town.
I'm glad I spent my 60th summer working on bird houses and flowers.
I won't go section 8 on the bird houses again this year, though.

However, I will rent one of them out to one of last year's tenants. She's the little chickadee that was in school working on her RN. I hear she got it and is working at the bird hospital and getting on her feet.
She's trying and I figure I'll give her a good deal on the place she had last year.

The rest of last year's section 8 tenents can go somewhere else. I spent an awful lot of time cleaning up after those pigs. I got tired of the cops showing up all the time, the noise and all the dreadful stuff that went with it.

There was a lot of work to a few of them. They got torn up pretty bad. The ones where the tenants were dealing drugs were probably the worst and I've had to bury a few birds that were victims of drug related crime.

Last seasons marigolds I left in the ground until well after Thanksgiving and they all appear to have reseeded on their own but I'm not too sure they are not of the variety that are sterile so I really do not know what I am going to do yet.

If they are not sterile and even 1 in 500 sprouts I am going to have a serious jungle on my hands. Those marigolds sure put out an awful lot of seeds.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

There's always someone that makes life hard on the rest of us.

My shipmate has just started to plan his next time off and he has to fly around a bit. He's starting to get pretty annoyed with the way the airlines run things. I don't blame him.

Many of the airlines have been charging extra for luggage for some time now and things have gotten a little out of hand as now everyone and their cousin is hauling their luggage on board so as to avoid the $25 per bag fee. My shipmate travels with a full sized backpack which he coughs up the $25 for and brings a small soft briefcase with his as a carry-on.

Of course, there are an awful lot of people that manage to get on board carrying stoves, refrigerators, steamer trunks and the like on board that insist it will fit into the luggage space. It irks him to no end because half the time after he sits down someone tries to yank his briefcase out of the bin to cram their behemoth into the space.

Needless to say he tells them to leave his stuff alone and refuses to cram his briefcase under the seat. After all, HE coughed up his $25 so he wouldn't have to try and cram things in. I can't say as I blame him. He coughed up the $25 simply so he could have some space under his feet and some jerk too cheap to cough up wants him to give up his legroom so they can cram their trash into the overhead by pulling his stuff out of it to make room.

Of course they call the stewardess who tries to take the easy way out and try to get my shipmate to stuff his briefcase under the seat and he rightfully refuses. The stewardess-excuse me-flight attendent-(hoop-de-doo) generally is trying to take the easy way out to expedite things.

What she actually should be doing as making the jerk cram his goods and garbage under HIS seat instead of inconveniencing everyone else.
Needless to say, when it is all over and done with, my shipmate winds up being labeled the asshole. It always seems to work that way.

In reality this scene plays itself out just about every time a plane takes off and when you think about it the airlines encourage the practice with the $25 per bag fee. Americans hate to be nickel-dimed and I can't really blame the passengers for trying to avoid the fee.

In a sense the airlines have brought this upon themselves with their luggage policy. What they ought to do is simply charge another 10 or 15 bucks and simply permit one carry-on item, period. Simple policy. You toss your purse, laptop, whatever in the overhead and sit down and get the show on the road.

Another thing the airines do that is just plain stupid is that they load the plane from the front to rear. The First Class set gets seated first and they jam the aisles up until they are seated. It works its way down creating pushing, people slowing things up. Elbowing and pushing are not unheard of and the entire process is chaotic.

If they would let the people in the rear get on first instead of the system they have now everything would run a whole lot smoother.

While the First-Class passengers might gripe a bit I would imagine that if you market is 'reduced pushing and shoving' you very well might be able to change the order of self-importance that people pay extra for from being 'Boarded first' and being elbowed by everyone trying to get by you being the status symbol to being 'boarded last' and avoiding the chaos. It cold turn out to be a win-win situation.

Then again, asking people to think is a lot to ask for.

############################
There is another thing that irks me about flying and that is the reluctance of an awful lot of members of the general public to turn off their electronic during take offs and landings.

While I doubt that the use of most electronic devices endangers the flight instruments as such, the airlines want you to do this. It is their airplane and their set of rules. If they do not want you to run your electronics you don't have to fly on that airline.

If you're so damned special that you think the rules do not apply to you than get back on the short bus where you belong and take that to where you are going.

It's as easy as that.






my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Post 1000. Signage

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

busy as hell

now. I may post later


It's later


I am back to doing what I do and things are beginning to settle down a bit.

I had a pretty good breakfast this morning because I knew it was going to be a long day and I was right. It has been pretty busy.

Over the past couple of days I have had to deal with a few minor problems that people have made out of thin air.

I swear, I could rob a bank, come out with $3,347,987.27 in small unnsequestially serial numbered bill, make a clean getaway and someone in the conspiracy woould start bellyaching about the dime laying on the floor that I didn't stop to snag on the way out.

All in all it was a pretty good time home.

One of the things I have noticed is that a lot of local hams monitor the 2 meter band and have then in their rigs. I have a small on-the-roof antenna that I sometimes hook up to my little handy-talkie and it has actually been pretty useful a couple of times for snagging directions and finding out about traffic tie-ups.

A lot of other guys use them when running errands just to have something to do while running errands.

While most of the time the unit my rig will be off, it is a good thing to have.

Right now I am getting a little scared because a couple of guys are gloating about how winter is over already. The Great Yogi Berra was speaking the truth when he said, "The game ain't over 'til it's over."

I have seen some pretty horrific snow storms pop up out of nowhere and go back to where they came from over the years. Bam! Four feet of snow!

Last night a friend who is another ham had me over for a while to check out some of the digital work he is doing with radio. He was doing some of the digital stuff I know little or nothing about and while it was fascinating from a technical point of view, it does not appear to be me.

I have no real interest in hooking a computer to a radio at this time because to me it takes the personal touch out of it.

When I turn the rig on to either AM or SSB I hear a person and I have also managed to discertain different styles while listening to Morse from time to time. Every operator out there that is running Morse and isn't using an automatic keyer seems to have their own style.

While it is not as human as a voice, it is at least something and to me a computer can be a pretty impersonal thing.

I guess it is the same in businesses. Back not too long ago sales types were generally pretty personable types and they often met face to face with clients. These days an awful lot of business is done with email and electronic devices and I think a lot gets lost that way.

Of course, you generally buy a car from a dealer and have to face those kind of people. I think my next car I am going to purchase on line to avoid having to deal with car salesman.

Other than cars, though, I like to see and check out what I am buying.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Well, I have now worked 50 states.

Well, I have now worked 50 states.

I bagged Rhode Island yesterday by sort of crashing a party.

I found out about this 40 meter net that was primarily a New England net and started listening and looking up call signs and suddenly realized the guy running the net was from the Nutmeg state.

So I threw in my call sign to check in and we exchanged call signs and signal reports. When that was done I told him he was my 50th state in my WAS project. I asked him for a QSL card and he agreed. I think by the tone of his voice he realized he wasn't too pleased.

The other guys seemed to think it was pretty cool and a couple of them congragulated me.

His is in the mailbox now along with an SASE to make it harder for him to weasel out of sending me a card.

Postage is going up so I guess if you want a paper card back these days it is probably a pretty good idea to incluse an SASE. I have not really been doing this unless asked so that may be part of the reason I will probably have to work a couple states again to get paper.

While all of this can be done by computer, the ARRL requires either paper or their own electronic QSL bureau. I really do not want to open an account at the ARRL because the bureau at the ARL is not really too user friendly. Maybe it's me, but for this project it is going to be paper.

Alaska was the roughest but things like that are where I really shine. It was about a three hour long drawn out drama where I had to improvise, overcome and truly focus. I only left the rig once for about three seconds to yank my dinner out of the oven when it was ready to burn. I threw the baking fish full of cod on the rug beneath my feet until it cooled and yaffled it down with bare hands, wiping them off on my clothing.

Clothing can be washed. Soap is cheap. Opportunities are priceless and have to be taken advantage of. The truth is simple. Ya gotta wanna. I wanted this state bad. Real bad.

The Alaska contact actually took three of us because there was a guy in the middle of us cheering us on and middle manning things. When someone wanted to try another band he passed the work back and forth.

Right after a sloppy dinner I had to urinate and it I mean now. There was a small wastebasket nearby and I had been meaning to ditch it anyway. I used that and tossed it out the window. It has since been picked up, rinsed out and now resides in the trash.

I'm no stranger to things like this. When I was fishing in Alaska I have peed my pants while working gear. I am not alone. In fact, I suffered a touch of food poisoning once and projectile vomited all over a shipmate once. I said "Excuse me, Randy".

"Well, certainly, Pic," he replied. Not a single word was ever said about the incident. A couple of seconds the heavy seas washed everything away.

Anyway, it came down to where the man in Alaska was receving me but I was not receiving him. We had changed between the 17, 20 and 40 meter bands a few times to no avail. I had an idea and ran with it.

I chopped power by switching rigs. I switched to Old Reliable, the little backpack rig, the PRC 320. While it only supposidly puts out 30 watts (I think less) the receiver can pull a signal out of a tomb. I also put on the headset and experimented with the volume control. It is a misnomer that to hear throough the noise that you turn up the volume.

When you do that you also turn up the background noise. You fiddle around until you find the spot that fits so you can hear the signal best through the noise. Sometimes you turn the set down.

In a way he was kind of stuck because he had one rig to work and was doing pretty much what I was, working on a simple improvised antenna. I was lucky because I had another tool to work with.

I tuned the antenna and clamped on the headset and went into a Zen focus.

I found out what he had already told me via internet before we started. He had the entire Chugach mountain range blocking his signal. Apparently I was skipping over it and he could receive me even though I was down in the mud of the background noise on the band.

We swapped bands to 17 meters. Same deal. We tried 40 meters but no luck. His tuner would tune 40 but the fact remains the wire had been cut for 20 meters and after a while went back to 20 meters. On 40 meters the antenna, although tuned, was ineffecient. No dice on 40.

Finally out of the mud I could make him out a little and the band lifted just enough for his signal to reach me. It was weak, garbled somewhat but distinct enough to allow me to pick out his call sign and a basic signal report and that is enough to qualify for a 2x2 QSO.

We called it a wrap.

I got his QSL card today. It is hand made as his printed ones are not in Alaska but you can bet your ass I am going to use that one to submit for credit for Alaska even if I bag AK again and get a pretty card from the Last Frontier. You're damned right!

This will be a wonderful memory for me.

I'm damned glad I found a ham with the same intensity I had that night and also damned glad there was a middle man there that stood by us the entire time. They don't make a whole lot of people like that these days. I owe them both for their stick-with-itness. It's a rare quality.

This is only my side of the QSO. I can't speak for the other guys but it was something I really enjoyed doing. I needed a chase to clean out my liver.

I don't chase things too often but when I do there are going to be one of three outcomes. I will either catch what I am after, I will fall from complete and total exhaustion from running entirely out of fuel or I will die.

I'm glad I decided to chase this because it made me feel alive and whole again.

A few minutes afterwards I pulled a big snort out of the Jameson's bottle, went outside and rinsed out the wastebasket and threw it in the trash. Then I came inside and took off my fishy clothes and threw them in the hamper. After being a savage it was time to be civilized again. I grabbed a shower and poured myself another stiff one and sat a while enjoying success.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Well, yesterday life imitated art while I was at the zoo.

Yup, yesterday I went to the zoo. I have not been to a zoo in well over 40 years and it was pretty neat in a way seeing all the animals. I especially like the big cats. They made me wonder what it would be like to have one on a leash as a seeing eye leopard.

Anyway, while I was looking at the elephants something happened. I had a bright idea and this was just another case of a man having to do what a man has to do.

I fished out my cell phone and went to the ring tone I use for Neighbor Bob, the Tarzan yell and played it twice. The first time the elephants heard it the looked to see where it was coming from. The second time I played it they started trumpeting.

I quit while I was ahead and a few seconds later a staffer came in and started looking around and asked me if I had done anything to make the elephants trumpet like that.

You all know the drill. I said, "Who me?" and shrugged "I was just standing here looking at the elephants."

He gave me a dubious look and shuffled off.

I figured that I did quit while I was ahead because maybe if I had played the yell a third time I might have started an elephant stampede or something. Picture about 6 or 8 elephants out running around looking for a native village to tear up.

Anyway that is good to know. For all these years I figured that it was just a bunch of Hollywood malarkey but the Tarzan yell really does get attention from elephants. Pretty neat.

I figure I got off light. I do not recommend trying this. An elephant stampede would not he a good sight to behold.

Besides, there were no vines nearby for me to swing on to escape with.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Ya gotta love hams.

Since I have mentioned being stonewalled in my attempt to get a Rhode Island QSO and complete my Worked All States' project I have gotten three emails from various hams with what will probably end up being pretty good leads.

The best offer was from a Massachusetts ham offering to put a portable rig in the back seat of his car and drive to a rest area over the border and set up to give me a QSO from Rhode Island.

I can picture myself explaining that QSL card to the ARRL guy that is going to have to go through all of my cards. It would be a Massachusetts card with a note on the back that the man was operating portable in Rhode Island. I can see the raised eyebrows over that one.

The other night on one of the nets I frequent I made the comment that I'd give someone from a neighboring state ten bucks for gas if they would go portable and drive across the border. Net control must have been preoccupied with running the net because I detected a little WTF in his voice but I think the six other guys that are also looking for RI probably grinned.

Incidentally, while I have worked 49 states so far only 40 are confirmed with QSL cards. I think I am going to have to rework these different states until I can get a QSL card from the state before I take them to the ARRL guy to have it confirmed and collect my certificate.

In other news I got my truck back yesterday. Apparently the part was air freighted which it should have been under the circumstances. I didn't have to pay a cent for the job and I looked at the paperwork and about died when I found out what it would have cost me.

About a grand! They did have to replace the pads on both sides and they did have to resurface the rotor and replace a caliper but holy Moses! That's a lot of money for a caliper replacement.

Oh, yeah. They also did the gas pedal modification that Toyota ordered after the idiot with the loose floor mat got it jammed in the gas and had a runaway truck.

Here's one for you.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

There are four ham radio operators in the entire state of Rhode Island.

One is dead.

The next one is a doddering old slobbery geezer in a rest home that has a 2 meter handy-talkie and keeps dropping it out of his bed.

The third one is a novice and can not use an HF rig until he passes the General test.

The fourth one is tired of everyone bugging him to send them a QSL card so he tells everyone he lives in Wrentham, Massachusetts.

I have half a mind to take my PRC-320 and set it up in a park in Providence and go on the air. I would check into several of the nets and be the most popular guy on the net that night because there are an awful lot of guys like me that need Rhode Island to complete their Worked All States award.

As for me?

I'll just take the 2 meter handy-talkie with me and go on the local repeater and after we've chatted I'l drive by his house and pick up a QSL card and call it good.


In other news.

On Wednesday I brought my pickup to the dealers to have a sticky caliper fixed on my pickup. They were supposed to have it for me that night.

Apparently the parts are located in Outer Slobovia or possibly Inner Mongolia because the rig is going to spend the weekend in the shop and I have no clue if it will be ready by the timme I need it to go to work.

They offered me a loaner 'so you can get back and forth to work'. When I pointed out that I am a Merchie and would drive the car to Philly and leave it parked there for about a month.

I had this problem a while ago with an insurance company offereing ma a loaner after the pickup got clobbered by a drunk over a year ago.

I had a hard time getting it to sink in with them and these guys are no exception. They do not understand what they are going to be getting in to.

The drill is this: I take their car to Philly and about 2 days later I start getting calls asking me if there is any way I could return the car. This is followeded by the "Gee! I didn't know...could you maybe sneak off and swap it out somehow?"

"No sweat. Call FlightCo helicopters out of Port Arthur and have them snag me and fly me to Galveston, Texas and then I'll fly back to Philly and then you can fly me back to Shreveport, LA and have a chopper there run me out to the boat. I'll start packing right now."

"But..."

"But I explained this to you long before I took the car. Which of the two words 'one month' didn't you understand?"

"Wait a minute...where are you now?"

"About 40 miles out of Galveston headed in a straight shot for the Keys and then up the coast to New York."

"Well, we're going to have to do something about this! I never heard of such a thing!"

"You sell Toyotas, right? Some are still made in Japan, right? How do you think they get them here?"

"I guess they ship them."

"Who works on the ships?

"I dunno, sailors, I guess."

"Correct. I am one of those guys. I am a sailor. I told you a dozen times."

There is no way I am going to deal with stupidity like this and it happens quite a bit to seamen because an awful lot of the world has no clue as to how goods are moved around.

People will agree to al sorts of things like this and then want to blame me and the best way to avoid the hassle and bellyaching is to simply stuff $1200 worth of groceries into the Miata somehow and drive it to Philly.

Wish me luck because I do not see the pickup getting fixed on time.





my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

Sitting here in the morning planning my day

As I write this I am sitting here next to my HF rig trying to establish contact with either SD or RI because those are the two remaining states I need for bragging rights on having had contacted all 50 states.

(Update: Bagged SD. Now all I need is RI)

I am on the YLISSB net and I mentioned that I needed RI and SD for my WAS project.

Another ham got back to net control and told her he knew someone in RI and that he was going to give him a shout to check in so I could work him. I was somewhat shocked to say the least. Sure enough someone from Rhode Island checked in but propogation between here and Rhode Island was bad and I could not establish contact.

I'm still on the net and we'll try later.

There is a woman that runs net control that is down in Texas and constantly comes in as clear as a bell. She's damned good at running the net and someone told me she does it Old School style with a pencil, paper and a memory that must have a hard drive that would make Bill Gates green with envy.

How she keeps tabs on things so well is beyond me. The woman ought to move to Chicago and run the air traffic system at O'Hare. She'd be a natural for the job. She runs a net that sometimes has 60 or more check-ins and never misses a lick, keeping track of who wants too work who. It is truly amazing.

One night I got stuck running net control for an ad-hoc net that popped up off of a web site I frequent and it was only six or seven guys and I had my hands full. I don't see how she does it.

Now, I am not a member of this net but the people running it have really busted their butts to try and be helpful with me on my WAS project.

These people make no money doing this, but do it out of love for the hobby.





Later today I have to go to the dealership and pick up my truck. A brake caliper got sticky and I need it gone over. While they are at it they will install the Toyota mandated little gas pedal dealiebobber that they have been sending me letters about for a while. It is over some floor mat that supposidly gets caught in the gas pedal and causes a runaway vehicle.

Of course, there were lawsuits over that issue and when I think about it it irks me because if anybody does not have enough sense to either step on the clutch or throw it into neutral than they should not have a driver's license to begin with. While the auto manufacturers have a responsibility to make good products, the user also has a responsibility to know how to operate it.


My truck is supposed to be ready at noon. I think I may grab the PRC 320 and set it up in the lot and check in on a net somewhere while I wait. It is a nice day for it.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

It's starting early this year.

Last night at about 0400 the motion detector went off and turned the outside lights on. It woke me up and I looked out to see what was going on.

The deer have returned. I was treated to watching them mosey on through into the back yard where they will presumably find something there that will please their discriminating palates.

It's been an exceptionally mild winter so far and as a result the deer looked a lot better fed than they did at this time last year. I suppose that is aa good thing.

Last year I watched the miracle of the birth cycle out my back window as two fawns were born maybe 75 feet away from where I now sit. It was pretty neat.

A walk into the front yard tells me that last years marigolds seeded themselves well and maybe I won't have to start them again this year but we'll see. If so I will because I like having a pretty garden out front.

I suppose in a couple of days I am going to have to go through the bird houses and empty last year's nests out of them.

Of course I am jumping the gun, though. Winter is not quite over yet and we still could get clobbered with a snowstorm.

Still, all in all it has been a mild winter here. I'll take it with no complaints.

I chatted with an Amish guy I saw at Lowes a couple of days ago and we discussed this particularly warm winter we had and he told me to expect a pretty buggy summer because generally the ground freezes deeply enough to kill off a lot of the grubs.

When a Dutchman speaks about things like that you generally ought to listen because there are maybe four in the entire state that do not know an awful lot about things like that. Virtually all of them farm one way or another and they are damned good at it.

So we will pay for this mild winter with a buggy spring.

Right now I am on 2 meters as I type this. The guys are funny. We are gabbing about growing up and discipline. Yesterday I got into hot water with the eBay gang because I asked a guy selling a cattle prod if he thought it would be a good tool to get the kids to eat their vegetables.

He had no sense of humor.

I just stepped outside and while I did I noticed the doorknob was slightly loose. I just grabbed a screwdriver and tightened it in about six seconds.
It doesn't take much to keep things up.

Anyway I am up and about.


my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/