n4gix

I spent most of my day yesterday working as "Net Control" for our local club's "Eclipse Net." I did manage to step outside my cottage and view the total eclipse with my own eyes and enjoy the spectacle for the few minutes of totality. When it ended, I immediately stopped looking directly at the sun and returned to my desk and duties safely. It was an awesome experience! The forecast was for high, wispy clouds here and that is precisely what we got. Not too long after the eclipse however, cloud cover moved in, and it rained all night long.

I feel your pain at the loss of a long-term companion. Fifteen years ago, my little mini-daschund had a stroke and had to be put to sleep according to the vet. To this day I still catch glimpses of him in my extreme peripheral vision. I decided that I'd not have another animal for a companion as I'm getting too old to guarantee his or her care.

Nice trip in a terrific airplane!

There's no need for me to travel as I live directly under the moon's path. I will be involved with an emergency communications network. We are expecting over a million visitors in our neck of the woods!

Well, this Bill most often will have to get up to take a leak about every 3 hours. Darn it!

Thanks Charlie. I was just too lazy to go looking up stuff. 😏

Was he any relation to Charles?

I should think that firing at and downing a UAP falls into the Very Bad Idea category... 😱

I cannot afford subscription services, so I'm not able to watch Halo. I watch a lot of recovery videos however, and getting used to seeing through the lens of a body worn camera has much the same effect as the cited "shaky cam..." 🙃

Actually, now that I've reflected on this, how did he manage to retract the gear since the towbar is firmly attached (temporarily) to the nose gear's axle. How would the nose gear bay doors even close?

ATC recording. Imagine how embarrased the pilot must have been!

Especially when most modern cameras have built in image stabilizers! One has to really strain hard to get shaky motion.

The poor dear was exhausted from such a long flight. It has to rest for awhile.

Starlink satellites are all in low earth orbit, so are not geo-stationary.

I dearly love cats... ...who belong to other people. 🤭

Alas, I have no happy memories of my earliest childhood. I was the youngest child of my natural family and was sadly neglected by my parents and siblings. At the age of two I was rescued by a kind policeman rummaging in a dirty alley's garbage cans looking for something to eat. He took me to the chief judge of Hardee County, FL. This worthy took charge and allowed me to live with he and his wife in their residence. All these decades later I still have an occasional nightmare of that nasty alleyway! Some few weeks later, after terminating my natural family's custody, he placed an ad in the Miami Herald that I was up for adoption. Long story short, my future adoptive parents gave me a loving home. Ironically, the final adoption took place on Father's Day 1952. I was literally my dad's Father's Day present! 😁

That is Oesterreicher Deutsch! 😉

Among my late father's stuff, I found a complete collection of Gunsmoke both B&W and color... ...all on antique VHS tape. I'm just glad it wasn't in Betamax! 🤣

Whenever that movie was broadcast on TV here in the U.S., It took three entire nights to show the entire movie. I'd love to watch it again! I could easily imagine how it was for my ancestors as they spread across the entire continent. There are many living in Ohio, but the rest are mostly in Oregon and Washington.

That is just plain nuts! I have to wonder just how many of these type loggers died in the process. 🤔

Thanks for the reminder Sue, that was a very sweet thing to say. 😉

Thanks, Noel! This last adventure took place during an unusually heavy snow event here in south central Arkansas, which made the journey to the hospital's emergency room slow and nail-biting! I have a scheduled trip to the VA hospital in Little Rock on the 31st for a colonoscopy, so I'll have had both ends of my digestive track thoroughly examined. Oh joy! 😜

Thanks! Since I'm here already, allow me to wish you an early birthday and my prayers for another quarter century! 😇

Well, I've somehow survived for seventy-five years now, although I must admit that it was a close call! For the third time in as many months, I had to be taken to CHI St. Vincent Hospital in Hot Springs. First it was for a severe viral lung infection. The doctor's diagnosed COPD, but I still believe the cause to have been viral: RSV to be precise. The following month was a repeat of the first stay, but fortunately it only required three days before being discharged. Last Thursday, I had to get one of my fellow vets to take me there as I had become dizzy, lethargic with very low energy. I honestly thought I was dying. Well, I wasn't entirely wrong as I had developed a very low-grade pain in my mid-abdominal area that went away after eating some food, but then reappeared sometime later on. Also, my stool had suddenly changed from a light cream color to very dark black, with a light tinge of red. After blood work it was discovered that I had lost three units of blood and was on the verge of complete failure. Yikes! After infusing three units of blood, they rushed me to the operating theater and performed an endoscopy, during which they found and cauterized two bleeding ulcers. I nearly died from hypovolemic shock. The "Milestone Reached?" Today was my seventy-fifth birthday, which I celebrated alone, back in my little cottage in the forest.

The HMS Bangor appears to have a fiberglass hull. A huge hole was made by the stern of the HMS Chiddingfold. I pity the poor soul who was piloting this ship, should the collision not to have been some mechanical failure, as he/she might be in for a Royal Tongue Lashing!