A new puppy...

Pam's car died last week on the way home from work. I had been telling her for a couple of years to get rid of it and get a new one, but she wanted to drive it until it died and then she would get one. Well, lucky for her it decided to grant her wish only about a half mile from home. She couldn't get it going so she tried to call me on her cell phone...the one I told her to get rid of last year because it wasn't holding a charge. Guess what -- the cell phone wouldn't work either.

This all worked out OK since she was so close to home. She called me from one of the houses down there, and I went and got her.

OK. So now we went to look at new cars. I once told her that going to look at new cars was like going to "look" at puppies...you can't just look at them, you always come home with one. So now she is the proud owner of this fine 2010 Chevrolet Malibu. Boy is it nice. I certainly like the smile on her face when she drives it, and I think I felt just as happy for her as she was. It is a safety award winner (air bags all over the place -- don't read anything into that either) and really rides nicely. Good choice.

I know we don't need all those gadgets on a car, but it certainly makes me feel better about her driving to and from work every day, knowing that she is as safe as Chevrolet and I can make her.

Oh, one other thing... Some things about car shopping never change. When she went to pay for it, they tried to sell her all kinds of extended warranties and such. They asked her how long she had her last car and she told them 10 years. They tried to establish a case that she should get these warranties because if she keeps her car that long this will "pay for itself" in repair costs and will give her a well-maintained car to trade in at that time on another new one. She informed them that if she kept this one that long, she wouldn't need a new car and doubted that wheel chairs would be that expensive. Although after this health care thing gets going, they may be and she may not get one!!

Maturity is when you want to see how long your car will last instead of how fast it will go.

Hooah

Sorry about that...

If any of you signed on yesterday or today, you got a rude little Trojan Horse warning. I hope everyone had their anti-virus up and running. Anyway, it appears someone hijacked my site for a while. I was up till 0300 Sunday morning trying to attack it as a virus problem or a spyware issue.

Doug, our son, called tonight to tell me what the issue was -- hijackers!! He told me how to fix it, but I couldn't find on the tool bar the area he mentioned, so I went into the help section and typed my problem in the "search" section. It seems there has been a rash of these events recently and there were lots of them a while back. Fortunately, the "blogger" site has guys who police their area and write help articles so people can fix the problems they find.

My "fix" was as simple as deleting the cool gadgets (ball clock, fish pond, calendar and counter) one at a time and clearing the cache each time until the Trojan horse went away. What a pain. I remember when the biggest problem I had with electronics was someone listening in on the party line when I was making a phone call (some of you will remember party line phones out in the country in the 50s), or my sister listening in on an extension phone when I talked to friends at night.

Anyway, sorry about the hassle. Glad my son got me on the right path. I'll get back to the entries in a bit. I still owe you all lots of stories.

In God we trust, all others we virus scan.

Hooah

What would they think of our winter...

I just finished a book about the Battle of the Bulge and got to thinking about our winter and the one those WWII Soldiers endured. When we get too cold or tired of shoveling, we go inside where it’s warm. They couldn’t….there were no warm places for them. When we get tired, we sleep in our warm beds. They slept where they could, usually standing in their foxhole which was frozen, or muddy with water in the bottom. We get too bummed, we can go to Florida. Their only way out was on a stretcher or a short trip to the rear for a cup of coffee and then right back to the front. The story was pretty much the same for Korean War Soldiers who survived those three brutal winters. Thoughts of the Yalu River and Inchon Valley bring involuntary shudders from those who were there.

Take a minute to think how you would like to be out in this weather all the time with not much hope of getting something hot to eat, let alone people shooting at you day and night. It makes me even more thankful for those men and women who did and paid the price for our freedoms and for the freedoms of people they would never know.

So now what? How do you repay people like that? One way is to help sponsor a three-day trip for them to Washington DC to see their memorial. The Shelby County Vets to DC Committee has done this for two years and is currently raising funds to sponsor our next trip on May 21-23.

You can help get these heroes to DC by donating to this cause. Volunteers will be passing out flyers and taking donations in the next couple of months at various places throughout Shelby county and surrounding areas. Also, donations in any amount can be sent to The Shelby County Vets to DC, PO Box 408, Anna, Ohio 45302 and checks should be made out to “VFW Post 4239/Vets to DC.” All donations are tax deductible. You can even sponsor a Veteran’s trip in memory of someone for only $355.00. We’ve had people pass the hat at family picnics or reunions to get enough funds to “send a Vet in Grandpa’s name.” What a great way to honor a Veteran and Grandpa's memory.

The people of Sidney and the Shelby County area have made it possible for over 90 Vets to take this trip to date. We also have another trip scheduled for WWII and Korean War Vets in September. Our pledge to you and them is that we will continue to do this as long as the people support it. But please don’t put it off…some of these heroes won’t have another chance.

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catchers mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back. (Maya Angelou)

Hooah

Not everything in Washington was shut down...

18", 26", 42" and more. These snowfall totals rocked the wholly unprepared Washington area this past week and our nation's governmental process was shut down. The transportation system -- rails, metro, airlines -- were also all driven to the ground. Basically, the whole shooting match came to a grinding halt, for better or worst.

Well, that's not totally true. There was a group of Soldiers that still performed it's honored assignment, still bore "true faith and allegiance" to those who went before, to those Unknown Three who symbolize the sacrifices our Warriors paid for our freedoms.

Thank God for these Soldiers.
Thank God for their devotion to duty.
Thank God for their message.


I dream of a time, maybe not too far from now, when my grandson will ask me, "Grandpa, what was war?"

HOOAH

He was a pretty lucky guy...

Pam fixed me a really great salad with our dinner tonight, with shredded cheese, celery, nice crisp lettuce, and shredded carrots and a sun-dried tomato dressing. And I don't know what sparked it, but somehow I thought back to one of my early days in Iraq in 2004 shortly after the US had taken over the Baghdad area and the Command moved north to establish operations at the Palace.

Those were the days of the wild west, days where the bad guys were still trying to hold out and IEDs were just beginning to be a threat. Anyway, back to the salad.

Two things were getting in short supply -- food and bullets. I remember one night walking into the mess hall and there was an obvious shortage of food, bread, milk, etc. There had been a problem with the generators used to run the electricity there at the Palace, and it was a spotty thing having electricity all the time. We would go along and then lose all power and then, a couple of hours later, it would come up again. That really played havoc with our electronic operations, briefings, communications, etc. I thought it also could have been responsible for lost food. However, that wasn't the case. We were just running out of things.

The bad guys were becoming very successful at ambushing convoys bringing in supplies, so much so that the local contracted truckers wouldn't drive the routes without a US MP company providing security.

One evening, somewhere around the fourth or fifth day without a convoy making it in, I happened to walk down to the mess hall and saw a group of semis that had just arrived. I looked at one of the trucks, and it had a hole, about nine inches in diameter in one side, with the side of the truck all folded in around the hole, and with black dirt (smoke or powder residue) around the hole. As I walked around to the other side, I saw a hole, about 2 1/2 feet in diameter on that side with the skin around the hole pointing out. The MP told me that he had been hit by an RPG and it went straight through the truck and didn't blow up until it was exiting or just as it exited. In any event, it didn't hit anything in the truck and the driver, who was sitting in a lawn chair reading a paper in front of his truck, sure was a lucky guy. There were others in other convoys who were not so lucky. They risked a lot to deliver these goods and make some money. If they lost their truck, they lost their means of making a living forever. The driver told me this truck had been his father's truck -- it looked like it had been around those desert roads for a long, long time. I shook his hand, thanked him and told him he was a brave man. He seemed a bit confused at me, an American Army Colonel telling him this. Maybe no one had ever told him that before. I was with some other officers and there were lots of enlisted soldiers around looking at his truck. I didn't tell them to, but all the officers and a lot of the Soldiers shook his hand and thanked him too.

It's strange how things like that pop into my mind -- the truck, no salads, remembering the heat and sand -- especially when I look out the window and see it's still snowing here and has been for about two days. We're up to about 13-14 inches in places, with 3-4' drifts. I don't know...I still think I'll take this over that any day. You'll have to excuse me now while I go turn on the fireplace.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker. (Helen Keller)

Hooah

Hello America, and all ships at sea...

Yesterday was a good day in the radio hobby. I took my Extra Class test and passed it. The Extra Class license is the highest one a Ham operator can get and gives the operator quite a bit of growth room in terms of radio frequencies. Basically I now have a broader group of frequencies on which I can talk, look for other hams, and continue my efforts to "talk" to someone in every state. This also opens up the international search as the areas where the internationals often talk with us Yanks are less crowded at these new frequencies. So far, I have talked to a ham in Bulgaria and one in Romania, but now I'm gonna see what's out there. Also, I have also talked to a guy on an island off the coast of Maine, but I guess there are some who probably wouldn't consider that area as a foreign country.

I was a bit disappointed last night, however, as I fired up the rig when I got home from the club meeting thinking I would hear lots of Extra Class guys on the new frequencies. Ran through the dial a few times and switched to several bands, but nobody was on the air. Then I remembered, most of the Extra Class guys are pretty old. It was about 2230 hrs. Most of those guys have been in bed for 3 or 4 hours by now!!

Well, I'm looking forward to cruising the airwaves a bit more now. This is a pretty cool winter escape and it's good to talk to people in other areas.



Travels, whether mental or physical, are fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. (Mark Twain)

Hooah

One sidebar -- at the meeting last night, we were reviewing some communications from ham guys who went to Haiti last week to serve as emergency communications guys until they got their cell towers functional again. It seems that the one group was going around the country side looking for people and they were attacked by bandits who shot at them and tried to get their money and any other goods they could get to sell later. No one in the group was hurt, and they didn't lose anything to the bandits, but it certainly screwed up their efforts at helping people. I guess you have to be there to understand the situation.

What do you think...

We had an absolutely great Christmas this year. Doug, Danika and Quinn came here from New York as well as Randy and Margaret (Danika's folks) from North Carolina. The little guy is such a joy and certainly didn't disappoint us in the "smiles" category. Of course we got lots of pictures and thoroughly documented that wonderful morning. It was really funny watching him open his gifts -- sometimes the wrapping or the box got more attention than the contents. I seem to remember that with his daddy. He also liked playing with the manger, making the light (a.k.a star) come on while playing "Away in a manger..." several hundred times. He liked playing with the figures, and could say "Baby Jesus" by the time he left.

Oh, yeah, one other thing that was really neat, was this one picture that got snapped. Pam said it looked just like one of his dad when he was a baby. She hunted it down and found it in Doug's baby book. Quinn is 17 months, and Doug was 2 1/2 years old when this picture was taken. What do you think?
















Pretty remarkable, huh. I guess this is one of those "the acorn didn't fall too far from the tree" things. If that's the case in other things too, Little Quinn will do alright in life.

The definition of a grandfather -- a fellow who has replaced the currency in his wallet with snapshots of his kids and grandkids, and hasn't lost a thing.

Hooah