Warm, and warmer later, with some moisture in the air. Overcast all day yesterday, and humid. Sweated through my shirt just loading the truck and strapping the load down. More of the same, with possibly more moisture seems about right.
Well, yesterday I got a nap, did some domestic bliss, did my laptop cart pickup, then headed to the doctor’s office. That took a while for ‘reasons’. Then it was home to dinner, a nap, and bed. Exciting? Nope. But it was the sugar, not boredom that put me to sleep.
Today I’ll just start doing stuff and see where that takes me. I’ve got 6 laptop things to deconstruct, and some other stuff to do too. And since this weekend is my non-prepping hobby quarterly mini-swapmeet, I need to do a little bit of organizing wrt that. I have some stuff I normally bring, but nothing really new. It’s always nice to have something new.
And I will continue going through my stacks as I can and culling the breakage. I can smell that there was more. Time to find it, and see what needs to be replaced.
Stacking. It’s my default setting.
nick
Here we are and I’m the only one here. No Denis. Who’s the man? Who’s the man? It’s me. Not Denis, me. I’m the man. Denis is just some kind of sleepy thing. Yah, you got that right, I’m the man.
Yes.
You are the man, Chicken Boy!
🙂
https://townhall.com/columnists/jordan-sekulow/2026/05/07/cnn-lied-about-our-clientnow-its-before-the-us-supreme-court-n2675651
NYT v. Sullivan
tick tick tick…
“Span says XFRA is being installed during the construction process at no cost to the homeowner.”
No revenue to the homeowner other than a Griddy-type incentive for a discounted flat fee for electric service.
We all know how Griddy ended – with Ken Paxton writing big checks to bail out the wealthy homeowners and Clinton operative executives without any debate in the Texas Legislature.
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/nvidia-pultegroup-span-date-center-backyard/
67F. Cool, not warm, but I stand by the rest of my forecast… sorta.
——
WRT Span…
Don’t forget, they will need access when it needs hands on service or reboot. Also, what is the lifespan of a compute node these days? I’d be shocked if it was 2 years between upgrades. Easy to do in a rack in a data center, not so easy spread across 144 acres of neighborhood.
I can’t see this working out. I get the appeal from their POV, but if nothing else the UPS batteries will need to be replaced regularly.
It’s the infrastructure version of distributed bitcoin mining, or ‘folding at home’.
Plus, I think they have no idea how hard it is to keep equipment running in the field.
————
Kids are moving, lunch is packed. In 20 minutes I’ll be back in bed.
n
Mark your calendars.
https://www.obama.org/visit/museum-tickets/
The bond ghouls have heavily mortgaged most residential and small commercial properties in Texas, hence the insane tax rates in the state.
Something tells me that this scheme may become a state government mandate in the upcoming final currency distortion to support the capex required for the sex robots.
Ah say, boy, think about all the jerbs for hard working Texans.
A fine Acme product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGFtV-gTwiA
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/05/07/california-court-of-appeals-denied-state-la-appeal-in-wildfire-case-n2675673
No more delays for discovery.
Gross negligence vs. criminal negligence? How do 11 victims dying horrible deaths by fire weigh on the scales?
David Lynch died after being evacuated from his daughter’s house in the path of one fire. He isn’t a direct casualty, but he is still a casualty.
How many more stories are out there like that?
Ok, Nick, here’s a real-life story for you.
It involves unjustified trust in a CGM.
3 weeks ago, a 75 year old diabetic friend of mine woke up and took his morning insulin. He based the amount on the reading from his CGM. No one ever told him that they are notoriously inaccurate. Fairly precise, but inaccurate if not calibrated. Not all models of CGM can be calibrated.
He then got in his car and headed of to his normal Saturday breakfast with Ham friends.
He blacked out and ran his Toyota into a tree. It was so bad that they had to saw down the tree and use the jaws of life to extract him from the car. He was wearing his seat belt, but the airbag failed to deploy. (Side note: Original airbag was recalled, and replaced. It was the new one that failed.) Apparently, he overdosed.
10 days in the hospital, a week in rehab, and I understand he’s going to live with his daughter for a while. 3 broken ribs, bad bruising, damage to his tongue, and possible spinal injury.
At 75, he isn’t (wasn’t?) feeble. He is still running a small manufacturing business and occasionally riding his Harley. I’ve eaten lunch with him almost every Wednesday for a few years now.
A popular keto diet doctor on YouTube, Dr. Boz, is a fan of CGMs but specifies one model that can be calibrated, and warns not to put too much trust in the actual number, but rather to watch for trends. She wears a CGM, but still takes her own blood sugar and ketone levels using a meter, daily.
the insane tax rates in the state.
– Texas is number 7, with Nebraska and Wisconsin and Iowa making the rest of the top ten. All the others have state INCOME tax as well.
NJ, IL, CT, NH, VT, NY are 1-6, NJ is almost half again higher than TX.
We’re not even in the top 10 for average sales tax either.
Yes, the rate could be lower if they didn’t fund all the schemes and stadiums, but it’s not “insane”.
Highest overall tax burden? TX is 36th.
— I’ve lived in high tax states, and this isn’t one.
n
@ lpdbw, I’m glad he made it. I’m not diabetic though, nor on insulin. The diagnosis was the goal of all the recent testing. Rule that out, then figure out what IS going on and how to adapt to that.
If I didn’t want to eat carbs and sugar, or didn’t mind the enforced nap after some meals, I’d just continue on as I was. I rarely go out of the “green” zone on the monitor, and no where near the heights that ordinary people I’m talking to hit on a regular basis. High blood sugar for me is anything outside the green (170), and has never passed 250 in three months of me wearing the monitor, high blood sugar for some of the people I’ve talked to was high 200s or even in the 300s!
We checked my right arm sensor against the finger stick in the office yesterday and they matched. I have a finger stick tester and I’m going to use it when I change sensors, just to be sure.
I’m really glad I have all y’all double checking me. Just like with politics, it forces me to do some research and sometimes I’m surprised by the result (like when I discovered that Hartford CT was no longer black, but hispanic).
n
FWIW, I got the bill for my last visit, the finger stick test was billed at $90! IDK what the final payment for it was. I guess having the little Filipino girl do it is a big value add…
n
https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2026/05/07/charlotte-mayor-vi-lyles-resignation-n2202091
Another Dem resigning ahead of indictment?
Wow, that is huge. My knowledge of ion engines dates to a couple days in a propulsion class 40 years ago, but a specific impulse of 10,000 was considered very good.
If I recall right there was a optimum value for that, roughly double the max velocity of your vehicle for a given mission, but it’s been a long long time. There were a tremendous number of trade-offs and of course the elephant in the room was the weight of the electrical generation and handling systems.
The optimum value of acceleration / deceleration for any spacecraft is one gravity with occasional runs up to three gravities for a very short time. NASA has discovered that half of the population cannot handle free fall or low gravities.
This was documented in the awesome documentaries “Red Thunder” by John Varley and “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir.
One gravity accel / decel is one week to Mars at just about any position of Earth and Mars in the Solar system.
Or why Orange County CA is no longer a republican strong hold.
I paid less than that for my meter and test strips for glucose and ketones.
And then I fell off the keto wagon and never opened the strips or device.
Great Replacement is just a conspiracy theory and just shut your mouth, you MAGA racist!
I should have been more specific. Property taxes in Texas are insane.
And no one feels the full impact of the bond ghouls antics yet. As long as there is a surplus, the Legislature will use it to keep the real estate market from tanking via rate suppression.
As for overall burden, I believe an income tax is coming. Even when we lived in Vantucky just a dozen years ago, no one there believed that WA State would ever have capital gains taxes much less an income tax.
And besides, it’s just 100 million illegals SO FAR.
I just looked. The two recent Burnet school bonds passed. All of 625 or so votes total for each.
Dunno. That seems effed up that it takes so few votes to saddle everyone with higher taxes.
I stopped voting for (or more usually against) school budgets after about the third time that the voters rejected the budget, then rejected the trivially changed budget a month later, then the trivially re-changed budget passed by two votes a month after that. It became obvious that the school board would continue to run votes until they got the result they wanted and that’s the one that counts.
School board needs to walk into the meeting room and find a big roll of plastic under their seats and pinned up on the wall behind them.
Great Replacement is just a conspiracy theory and just shut your mouth, you MAGA racist!
So, when is Trump going to annex Mexico and South America ?
I loved fishing in Belize back in the 1980s. Except for the Nicaraguans running fighter jets across the border occasionally and the Brits getting all upset.
And annex Cuba. The fishing in Cuba is awesome.
If the budget is resubmitted without substantive changes, all board members are thrown out and cannot run for reelection for ten years. If the budget is voted down twice in a row, all faculty and staff contracts are terminated at the end of the current contract, regardless of tenure and with loss of all accrued sick days.
This plan goes against current NYS law but I have a solution for that: start shooting one state legislator per day until the education law is changed.
I already put forth my plan for that. Two plans, in fact.
Plan 1 (preferred): Start the troops on the US southern border. Head south. Kill everyone they encounter. Drive the native population southward. Let the Mexicans swarm over their southern wall into Guatemala as a nice change of pace. Keep going at least until we get to the canal. Optionally continue until the troops reach Tierra del Fuego, pushing all of the formerly native populations into the ocean. Important: expel all non-Americans from US soil into Mexico before the march begins.
Plan 2: Conquer Mexico. This does not need to involve removal or extermination of the population, just an acknowledged takeover. Declare the entire territory an ecological disaster zone. Conscript every Green Party member and declared environmentalist and send them into the former Mexico to perform cleanup. Might as well conscript every Democrat, Liberal, and Socialist while we’re at it. Once they’re all in former Mexico, declare that the US doesn’t really want it anymore, release it, and never ever let anyone from Mexico into the US.
Plan 1 (preferred): Start the troops on the US southern border. Head south. Kill everyone they encounter. Drive the native population southward. Let the Mexicans swarm over their southern wall into Guatemala as a nice change of pace. Keep going at least until we get to the canal. Optionally continue until the troops reach Tierra del Fuego, pushing all of the formerly native populations into the ocean. Important: expel all non-Americans from US soil into Mexico before the march begins.
Ah, the Genghis Khan Mongol approach.
Trump will lift the embargo before this term is out. Little Marco is Secretary of State for a reason, and Wee Pierre getting handed his walking papers early is part of the process as well.
“The Hantavirus Cruise and the Disease X Dress Rehearsal”
https://jdrucker.substack.com/p/the-hantavirus-cruise-and-the-disease
“Chances are the official narrative is correct. But we’ve learned over the past five years that we shouldn’t just take them at their word.”
“Three people are dead, one is in intensive care in Johannesburg, and a Swiss man is now isolated in a Zurich hospital after stepping off a ship that visited some of the most remote corners of the planet. The MV Hondius — a Dutch-flagged Oceanwide Expeditions vessel — sailed from Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, threaded its way through Antarctica, South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena, and Ascension, and is now bound for Spain’s Canary Islands after Cape Verde refused it port.”
“The pathogen onboard is hantavirus, specifically the Andes strain. Of every hantavirus strain on earth, that is the only one known to transmit between human beings.”
“The official line, courtesy of the World Health Organization, is that there is “no need for panic or travel restrictions.” Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe, said so himself. The official theory is that a Dutch couple picked the virus up on a bird-watching tour in Ushuaia before boarding, and that the rest is just rare, unfortunate spread.”
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
“No Man’s Land: Volume 3 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)” by Sarah A. Hoyt
https://www.amazon.com/No-Mans-Land-Chronicles-Lost/dp/1630110736/134-3120523-2822023?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number three of a three book space opera science fiction series in the Chronicles of Lost Elly. I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback published by Goldport Press in 2025. BTW, the author has promised a fourth book in the Lost Elly series entitled “Orphans of the Stars”.
Ok, this series is little strange but very good. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire, a retired Commodore in the Britannia Empire of Star System, becomes a roving junior ambassador for the Queen Eleanor. One of many junior ambassadors, also known as Skip Hayden. While drafting a new trade agreement with the newly found lost colony planet Draksall, Hayden is attacked by several men with Terran blasters. In the ensuing melee, Skip Hayden is transported via wormhole to another lost colony planet, Elly.
There are many lost colonies from Earth. When the wormhole transport technology was invented, people built a spaceship, recruited followers, and blindly jumped into machine made wormholes. But nobody understood how the wormhole generators really worked. And sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
Elly is unlike any other lost colony planet found to date. On the lost colony world of Elly, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong. There are no women, there are no men. All of the human beings are hermaphrodites. And there is magic, lots and lots of magic. Not much technology, mostly swords and bows. And the hermaphrodites are very different from the single sexed, very very different.
Skip Hayden is still on the run with the young King of Elly and a couple of his retainers. And offworlders with Terran blasters are still looking for them. But it turns out that people have been stealing babies from Elly for hundreds of years for their magic.
The book / series is a little hard to follow. There are many characters and many events with much jumping around. But now many of the mysteries of Elly are revealed.
The author has a fairly busy website at:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/
My rating: 5 stars out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.8 stars out of 5 stars (76 reviews)
Lynn
Seen elsewhere:
Why haven’t aliens visited our solar system? They looked at the reviews and saw only 1 star.
So they are all partying in Centauri system, with its three stars?
Trump will lift the embargo before this term is out.
– I agree, and think it’s time. Make the current leaders a deal or grab them in the night, I don’t care, then open it back up.
n
Stupid Mac OS update has borked the wifi stability.
If you let the system sleep for more than 24 hours you have to reboot to get wifi back, turning it off/on doesn’t work. Bah.
I suppose all the smart people are tasked with chasing
autocorrectAI.Indy publishing is great. It allows for some very strange things, like that junkyard cats/biker series, or the Innkeeper series. Heck, even Cedar Sanderson’s Pixy series was probably too weird for mainstream genre houses.
I’ve enjoyed some of the weirdness quite a bit. I do have a hard time reading Sarah’s fiction. But mostly like it.
n
“BREAKING: Federal Judge Unseals Jeffrey Epstein’s Alleged Suicide Note – READ IT HERE”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/05/breaking-federal-judge-unseals-jeffrey-epsteins-alleged-suicide/
That is a very weird suicide note. If, it is a suicide note.
Indy publishing is great. It allows for some very strange things, like that junkyard cats/biker series, or the Innkeeper series. Heck, even Cedar Sanderson’s Pixy series was probably too weird for mainstream genre houses.
I’ve enjoyed some of the weirdness quite a bit. I do have a hard time reading Sarah’s fiction. But mostly like it.
n
Sarah got let go by Baen about 4 or 5 years ago. She indy’d all of her books, took her about 2 years to do it since she did not apparently have the final edited versions. And Sarah did not ask for help from any of her fans, typical ADHD person. Her fans would have helped her in droves.
The first two books in “No Man’s Land” are really jumpy so I gave them a 4.4. The third book delivers in spades and fixes everything so I gave it a 5.
“It Just Keeps Happening Over And Over Again…”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/it-just-keeps-happening-over-and-over-again
“Another illegal migrant, handed legal status under Biden-era policies, is charged with brutally murdering two women in New York — one a hardworking mother of two, the other his own roommate.”
I keep on telling my wife that we are getting the dregs of human society as these illegal immigrants. We are not getting the best of other nations like we used to.
Why was Epstein’s suicide note written on stationary which says “From the desk of Hillary Clinton”?
We can call SA South aMAGAca, and Mexico will be South Texas.
One of my first deployments from Fort Riley, KS was to Fort McCoy, WI to run aerial patrols over all the Cuban scum sent to us in the 80’s. We would fly patrols in OH-58 Kiowa’s. “There’s one running! Ram a skid tube up his azz!” We kept Castro’s finest behind concertina wire.
102ºF on my remote sensor, 76ºF in my garage.
“Let’s Talk About Man Who Got Shot by Secret Service on Monday”
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2026/05/07/lets-talk-about-man-who-got-shot-by-secret-service-on-monday-n1232456
“For some reason, it wasn’t a bigger story, but a man was shot by the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., on Monday, just moments after Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade passed by. While the official line is that they don’t believe the man was intending to harm Vance or anyone else in the motorcade, the shooting still happened.”
“And boy, is there a lot to unpack in this one.”
“For starters, he was a convicted felon from Texas, carrying a gun illegally in the nation’s capital, and clearly not a fan of the current administration.”
“When agents approached, Marx ran, then pulled a handgun from his waistband while fleeing, according to a federal affidavit reviewed by Fox News Digital.”
“As officers chased him through a busy crosswalk filled with pedestrians, Marx turned and fired in the direction of a Secret Service officer, documents say.”
Do idiot things, get shot like an idiot.
“Idiot” is considered to be harmful these days. The preferred term now is “regular Democrat voter”.
“Dell Precision 7875 (2026) Review: A Supercomputer That Fits on Your Desk”
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/dell-precision-7875-2026
“Desktop workstations always bring a sense of excitement when they hit our bench, especially when one arrives with a 96-core AMD Threadripper Pro 9995WX processor, 512GB (yes, gigabytes) of memory, and dual Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 “Blackwell” professional graphics cards, each with 96GB of dedicated video memory. Dell’s Precision 7875 (starts at $6,714.02; roughly $92,000(!) as tested) is an unapologetically high-end machine, delivering highly scalable performance while meeting enterprise requirements for security, reliability, and extensive Independent Software Vendor (ISV) certifications. With near-limitless options for datacenter-class hardware in a tower that fits on a desk, the Precision 7875 delivers in every measurable way. For high-end workstations, it’s a natural Editors’ Choice award winner.”
Good night !!! That is a serious PC.
Please, I don’t want my adopted state associated with that mess.
Let’s call it “South New Mexico”. Or, I guess, “Old Mexico”.
Or rename “New Mexico” to “Mexico” and old Mexico “New Mexico”.
It can play Freecell like nothing ever before!
It can play Freecell like nothing ever before!
And Spider Solitaire simultaneously.
Redmond’s bloat never stops.
I saw code out of one propellerhead today which reinvents the libcurl wheel with the help of the AI. It was just a test tool, but that wasn’t a good sign.
Minesweeper. If you are trying to win that $1 million, that’s the machine.
“‘Muslims only’ at a Texas water park? Sara Gonzales warns Islamic ‘segregation’ is happening in plain sight.”
https://www.theblaze.com/shows/sara-gonzales-unfiltered/muslims-only-at-a-texas-water-park-sara-gonzales-warns-islamic-segregation-is-happening-in-plain-sight
“A ‘Muslim-only’ flyer revealed just how Islam is embedding itself into taxpayer-funded public spaces.”
I think that we are in trouble in Texas.
Currently 90F with winds at 35Mph out of the west at 5pm.
—–
A friend came by with his desktop PC, it kept powering off so he bought a new Corsair power supply for it and wanted help installing it.
It’s a very nice Win7 machine – a 10yo top end engineers workstation basically – and it still has a bunch of useful AutoCAD and drawing/engineering programs on it that he cannot afford to replace.
About halfway through the process he says something like “boy howdy, there’s a lot of dust on the CPU heat sink ” and touches it. And it wiggles and is clearly loose. So we pulled it off and the tiny little dab of heat sink paste underneath is hard and broken.
So our best guess is that the CPU was overheating and commanding a thermal shut down.
Eventually we finished installing the power supply, but he’s not going to turn it on until he gets some new thermal paste and applies it.
No WiFi problems on my M4 MBP.
Mac Mini M4 Pro … dunno.
I have a story about that.
Back in the mid-’80s, a friend who was an experienced and current aerobatic pilot took me up with him to give me an “introduction to aerobatics” flight. I was a passenger all the way, not expected to touch the controls, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
We started with barrel rolls, both ways, positive g’s all the way around, easy and fun. Next was a loop: 3.5 g’s on the entry according to the meter. That was pretty uncomfortable, even though I had my head back against the headrest. I’m glad the g’s didn’t last very long.
Then, instead of completing the loop as planned, he held us inverted at the top of the loop. While I hung there in the straps (I thought I had over-tightened them, I was *wrong*), looking through five millimeters of Lexan® at the Earth hanging above me, he demonstrated simple coordinated turns left and right while inverted. I did not enjoy hanging there. I did not enjoy being surprised. I did not enjoy all the dirt and grit and other debris that fell from the floor to the canopy (then later, back again). Bastard did not fly as briefed. I didn’t say anything.
Then he said, “Hey, I’ve never stalled one of these inverted, let’s see what she does.”
The good news is, in the stall we were simply rolled upright into normal flight, with no additional control input. He said, “Huh, I didn’t know it would do that.”
Double bastard.
I never flew with him again.
So, no, I don’t like negative g, and although I regularly flew up to 2 g’s (sustained coordinated turns at 60° bank angle), I don’t like more than that.
May be a problem with your WiFi, such as DHCP lease time. Check that setting in your router.
I would have added barf, chunky style, to the mix. Expulsions from the other end would have been contained by clothing.
Perhaps you’re making unjustified assumptions? dcp, anything you’d like to share?
45 years ago, as part of basic Naval Flight Officer (NFO) training, we did several simulator rides and 5 actual flights in a US Navy T-2 “Buckeye” jet trainer. The NFO isn’t a pilot; we’re the navigators, or weapons officers, or whatever else besides actually driving the bus. First flight was super-simple basic “intro to flying”. Since I was already a private pilot, it was easy.
Second flight “Intro to Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM)”. Yanking and banking, aerobatics, formation flying. The first barrel roll was fine, but a barrel roll is a 1G maneuver. The first loop was OK, but my stomach was already queasy. I had my barf bag ready for the next routines, and it was a good thing, because THIS NFO candidate did NOT like ACM. I don’t remember much of the rest, but at least I hit the bag and not the instrument panel or my knee. That would have been messy.
The instructor pilot (who was a few years younger than I was) was a little concerned, but not super-worried; he knew that I was prior enlisted and already had 2000 flight hours in P-3 Orion anti-submarine warfare airplanes, and that was where I wanted to go next. I aced the next 3 flights, which were mission planning, cross-country navigation, and other ordinary stuff, so at the end of the training, I did get my first choice of assignments and was assigned to aircraft navigation school.
And I’ve never been upside down in an airplane again, thank goodness!
The KC-135 refueling boom operator’s simulator was kind of the anti-pilot simulator.
Pilots would stick their heads in an get really disoriented. Flight simulators are (mostly) horizon and up, and you move toward the terrain. Boom operator simulator was horizon DOWN field of view, and you are moving AWAY from terrain… more than one pilot commented on how weird it was to look at.
–
negative G in a commercial airplane coming down thru a storm cell on final approach into Greensboro is as close as I’ve come.
The pilot came on and said that they were going around and making another approach “because the airport wasn’t where we expected it to be” when they came thru the storm…. That was exciting. I would have sworn that we actually moved backward more than once on that descent.
n
In several jobs I worked side-by-side with pilots. Some were private, some were military, some were retired military.
All of these were somehow related to my software development jobs.
I realized at some point that I was making judgments about my pilot coworkers, based on their professional attitude in the area of software development or program management.
There were a small handful I would, given the opportunity, allow to pilot a small craft with me in it. There were a few I felt were probably ok, but I would not choose to ride with them.
And there were many I wouldn’t get NEAR an airplane with. Not even riding in a commercial flight with them, on the off chance the real pilots might get sick and they’d end up in command.
My best friend, and the best co-worker I had, was a guy named Mike. I not only would fly with him, I did so a couple times. Once with my son and my father-in-law. Bright, methodical, steady under pressure, BS and MS in Aeronautical Engineering from top schools.
I’ve never been in a fixed-wing in which the pilot was shaking things up, though once there was a commercial passenger jet which had an engine backfire. Yes, that’s what the stewardesses were assuring all of the passengers. Just a backfire, it happens, nothing to worry about. My boss, an Army Major, was sitting next to an Air Force pilot and asked, “Jet engines don’t backfire, do they?” Slow head shake No.
Helicopters, now, there’s I’ve had some fun a couple times, Once, the pilot was just shuttling me and some others to a field exercise location. “Hey, anyone mind if we do some nape-of-the-earth and other maneuvers to keep in practice?” I don’t think the Huey (outdated by then but still in use) actually went upside-down but not for lack of trying. I was laughing because it was fun, but it was less fun when people started barfing. The other time was a pass over unfriendly territory and the pilot was jinking this way and that to confuse any potential hostile eyeballs and radars. I think. I didn’t ask about it, just stood ready to fire the M-60 on the side if needed. (Accuracy of all details there is suspect because as I was typing the details were shifting and fading. It’s been a lot of years and I’ve been up almost 20 hours after not much sleep.)
I think it might have gotten into the mid 80sF here today, and it definitely cleared up late afternoon. Sun came out and everything.
D2 had an activity at school tonight so we went to that. Ate some leftover pizza for dinner after.
I think I’ll try an early bedtime again tonight.
It’s 75F and nice out so I thought about a tiny little fire and a book, but I think I’ll just read in bed.
—-
I used to be rock solid, never got the swirlies no matter how I was moving. Not so much anymore. I get queasy on anything that spins now. And the visual distortion in Honda windshields makes riding in the passenger seat an issue for me too. It’s unsettling.
n
I’ve never been in a fixed-wing in which the pilot was shaking things up, though once there was a commercial passenger jet which had an engine backfire. Yes, that’s what the stewardesses were assuring all of the passengers. Just a backfire, it happens, nothing to worry about. My boss, an Army Major, was sitting next to an Air Force pilot and asked, “Jet engines don’t backfire, do they?” Slow head shake No.
Jet engines only backfire once. And then they belch fire in all directions as the combustion pots just melted.
Don’t be there. They throw compressor and power turbine blades next.