what did you do today? (2008-2015) (closed)

[NW-Bound]

YouTube - Dream a Little Dream by Louis Armstrong

 

[Walt34]

We returned back home from the DE trip for my half-sister's 60th wedding anniversary party. She and her husband were like older brother & sister to me and my sisters so we're all close. We left the hotel at 8:00 AM to avoid any weekend traffic jams at the Chesapeake Bay bridge and had no trouble with that.

A great party - some discussion given to whether my mother even knew I existed at the time of my half-sister's wedding - Mom would have been about three months at the time. As usual at such events, more food was available than anyone could possibly hope to eat.

 

[IndependentlyPoor]

Today we went out and gathered some green pecans and made Vin de Noix. The French make this with green walnuts, but I found that local pecans work just as well. You have to gather the nuts before the husks open, while the shells are still soft, and the nuts milky inside. It is almost too late now, probably should have done this a week ago.

It makes an brandy-like aperitif that you serve cold. This batch will be ready at Thanksgiving. The recipe makes more than you will ever drink during a year, so you will have a lot to give away.

The recipe is here
Vin de Noix

 

[Nords]

Hurricane preps almost complete. Felicia has spun down and is about to hit the skids as a tropical depression, but we're still going to get several inches of rain dumped on us Tuesday-Wednesday. This is the first major test of Oahu's electrical grid this year...

How do we forward a link of this posting to your wife's E-mail, so you get brownie points?

Trombone Al's just afraid that someone has cell-phone-camera photos of what he's been doing in the bars until such late hours...

 

[freebird5825]

Hurricane preps almost complete. Felicia has spun down and is about to hit the skids as a tropical depression, but we're still going to get several inches of rain dumped on us Tuesday-Wednesday. This is the first major test of Oahu's electrical grid this year...

Would it be completely tacky to say "batten down the hatches" right now?
Hope all turns out well there. Stay safe!

 

[Rambler]

Watched Crimson Tide last night. Don't know how true-to-life the story is, but have a new appreciation for Nords and his fellow submariners...

R

 

[REWahoo]

Rambler, if you want to have some fun ask Nords who played him in the movie...

 

[Dawg52]

I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since DW went to Sweden to visit her folks last week. I can't seem to get myself to go to bed until very late, and I still wake up at 6 AM.

Here you go Al. Looks a little Swedish. Might be worth a try. And no......I don't have one.

 

[JOHNNIE36]

Hurricane preps almost complete. Felicia has spun down and is about to hit the skids as a tropical depression, but we're still going to get several inches of rain dumped on us Tuesday-Wednesday. This is the first major test of Oahu's electrical grid this year...

Nords, last week DW and I dropped down to Ft. Myers Beach for a little
R & R and heard about the hurricane about to hit you. I got to thinking, I thought all "hurricanes" in the Pacific were called typhoons. I know that's what they are called in Okinawa. Clue me in again.

 

[TromboneAl]

Gee, thanks for the sleep aids, guys.

After a Friday and Saturday of gigs and socializing and dealing with more credit card fraud aftermath, I spent all of Sunday sitting in a recliner and reading a book. Didn't talk to anyone, didn't leave the house, didn't do chores. I call this recharging my introvert batteries, and I slept well last night.

 

[Walt34]

Watched Crimson Tide last night. Don't know how true-to-life the story is, but have a new appreciation for Nords and his fellow submariners...

R

The movies don't come close to capturing the feel of it. After a tour of the USS Torsk (WWII diesel sub) at the Baltimore Maritime Museum all of the guys I was with agreed that "Those guys had Big Brass Ones".

I cannot imagine working for months at a time under such cramped conditions while listening to depth charges. While I'm sure modern submarines have a little bit more room, there probably isn't much more.

 

[Dawg52]

Man......just finished mowing my mother's grass. Completely soaked with sweat. Temperature not bad but just frigging muggy. Time for a shower and nap.

 

[W2R]

Man......just finished mowing my mother's grass. Completely soaked with sweat. Temperature not bad but just frigging muggy. Time for a shower and nap.

The humidity down here is so bad and it really knocks down people from their mid-50's on who are perfectly physically capable of mowing, otherwise.

Time to get her to hire someone to mow her lawn. Let me see... I guess I mowed mine until I was 56 but probably should have quit sooner. Now I hire a lawn guy.

 

[freebird5825]

The day started with a downpour...rained all AM. Now it's just muggy and 82F. Cloud cover and shapes tell me more rain is coming.
I had a few things I wanted to do outside, but there is always tomorrow. That still feels so good to say.

 

[bbbamI]

I survived another morning at the p.d. It was dicey.

Came home and chugged a beer.

 

[Nords]

Nords, last week DW and I dropped down to Ft. Myers Beach for a little R & R and heard about the hurricane about to hit you. I got to thinking, I thought all "hurricanes" in the Pacific were called typhoons. I know that's what they are called in Okinawa. Clue me in again.

There are at least two activities naming storms out here-- one group in the Eastern Pacific (I think Miami's National Hurricane Center?), another in the Central Pacific (Central Pacific Hurricane Center), and a third west of the dateline (don't remember who). The first two call them hurricanes, with appropriate Mainland or Hawaiian names indicating where the storm formed. West of the dateline they're typhoons with some sensitive international politically-correct naming convention. My spouse the military meteorologist used to be the ops officer at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center so she can go into much more excrutiating detail on where the lines are drawn. It makes for interesting conversations when the forecast says one thing for the visitors while the weather charts/satellite images are showing something not quite the same as what the media are spouting. The trash-talking among military METOCs makes submariners look like diplomats.

Would it be completely tacky to say "batten down the hatches" right now?
Hope all turns out well there. Stay safe!

We're making the rounds again today-- educating our tenants about the yard's high-water mark and encouraging them to clean up their stuff, checking a friend's house (they're on the Mainland, their driveway slopes downhill to their garage, not so good for rain runoff), and then clearing the last of our [-]junk[/-] valued collectibles off our lanai.

Felicia's falling into a tropical depression but it's full of water. We're probably going to get 4-6" starting Tuesday afternoon, and around here that's half a year's rainfall. We'll definitely leak-check our roof repairs. Tomorrow morning it's a round of backups, battery-charging, and filling water jugs.

Watched Crimson Tide last night. Don't know how true-to-life the story is, but have a new appreciation for Nords and his fellow submariners...

Rambler, if you want to have some fun ask Nords who played him in the movie...

The movies don't come close to capturing the feel of it. After a tour of the USS Torsk (WWII diesel sub) at the Baltimore Maritime Museum all of the guys I was with agreed that "Those guys had Big Brass Ones".
I cannot imagine working for months at a time under such cramped conditions while listening to depth charges. While I'm sure modern submarines have a little bit more room, there probably isn't much more.

That movie didn't exactly have the U.S. Navy's support. During filming the director's helicopter tried to buzz a background film shot of an OHIO class submarine that was visiting Pearl Harbor. Naval Region ended up calling in the Coast Guard and the FAA and causing the pilot far more grief than he got in money.

That film is legendary in the submarine force for taking the worst possible features of each officer and putting them in direct conflict with each other. In real military life there are far more subtle non-confrontational ways to [-]stab your CO in the back[/-] seek compromise and consensus. But I swear that I've had at least two CO's in Hackman's image, and I've known of at least three more. [-]For example there's the cigar-chomping CO in the documentary "Sharks of Steel".[/-] Names provided to fellow submariners upon PM request, but you already know who they are...

The crew's behavior isn't too far off, although I'd love to have their VLF communications technology.

The "Tide" movie also gets a huge mess-decks laugh when the TV news shows some national crisis flaring up and all the boomer boys' beepers start going off. In real life they'd be handing the boomer's ice cream machine over to a fast attack submarine that ran out of time to fix their own before they had to sortie. Sometimes it's hard to believe that boomer and fast-attack submariners are shipmates in the same Navy.

[-]I was the missile tube visited by Gene Hackman's dog.[/-] I was a nuclear engineering junior officer on my boomer and a Weapons Officer on my attack sub. (For some obscure liberty-related reason the crew found it appropriate to rename me after that old 1980s pop song "Wild Wild Weps".) Weps wasn't exactly a career-enhancing job but it was a lot more fun than being a navigator or an engineer. Most fun of all was running the submarine training center's fire-fighting and damage-control (flooding) trainers. It was there that we'd figure out who had problems with small, enclosed [-]fires and flooding[/-] spaces... or who was pushing cardiac problems.

It's probably a psychological thing, but I always felt that I had plenty of room. The WWII subs are a bit tight and modern subs are a bit better. I have plenty of scar tissue from banging into various hatch coamings and other projections but my phobias are air travel, naval aviators, and stormy seas. I don't like roller coasters either.

You want submarine movies I'd recommend "Das Boot" and "U-571". DB's storm scenes, popping rivets, and battery problems are unfortunately very accurate. The U-571 scene where they take over the German sub and figure out how to launch torpedoes in about 90 seconds is total fantasy but very realistic adrenaline.

 

[REWahoo]

And no......I don't have one.

Neither does she. Coincidence I suppose...

 

[bbbamI]

Wasn't there a joke once about making a certain noise and flying out the window?

 

[theloneranger]

Played golf this morning for the first time in about 10 days. Played pretty good. Got to legally play from the senior tees as I am 55 today. Had some pizza and cake with mom so now time for a little golf on tv and then a nap. Looks like another storm about to brew outside.

I cannot BELIEVE that they let you go to the senior tees at 55.
Here we cannot move up till age 65, and there are still folks at 70 who can score in the low 80's from the regular tees.

 

[freebird5825]

Neither does she. Coincidence I suppose...

A match made in Heaven ?

Sorry, Dawg, it was the "low hanging fruit" that got me.

 

[Dawg52]

I cannot BELIEVE that they let you go to the senior tees at 55.
Here we cannot move up till age 65, and there are still folks at 70 who can score in the low 80's from the regular tees.

Well if that get's your goat, the 65 year old geezers move up to a 'super' senior tee here.

 

[IndependentlyPoor]

Upgraded my MacBook to 4Gig memory. When I was in college, I don't think there was 4 Gigabytes of memory in the entire universe and now it is sitting on my lap and cost me less than 100 bucks. Dang!
Installed iWork 2009, so I finally have a decent spreadsheet program to play amateur economist with.

 

[TromboneAl]

Wasn't there a joke once about making a certain noise and flying out the window?

Two elderly gentlemen, who had been without sex for several years, decided they needed to visit a cat-house for some tail..... When they arrived, the madam took one look at them and decided she wasn't going to waste any of her girls on these two old men.

So she used "blow-up" dolls instead. She put the dolls in each man's room and left them to their business.

After the two men were finished, they started for home and got to talking.

The first man said, "I think the girl I had was dead. She never moved, talked or even groaned... how was it for you?"

The second man replied, "I think mine was a witch."

The first man asked, "How's that?" "Well," said the second man, "when I nibbled on her breast.....she farted and flew out the window!"
​

 

[bbbamI]

That's the one!!!!

 

[freebird5825]

I'm beating the rain forecast...clouds are building up in real time...I got out to the garden and planted my tiny little Concord grapevines. These are cuttings given to me by a friend.
The mini-vineyard is complete. The other 3 seedless varieties are cranking right along and ready to be tied to the boards.
So easily amused...