18 October 2005 15:43
glimpses (and other miscellanea):currently eating spaghetti with my computer in my lap. a bad idea if i ever heard one.
on the subject of the sad lack of a monkey population in jamaica. discussion on how to start one such population... "we just need two. a pink one and a blue one". --Jordan
listening to the same song twice:
Punk Rawk Show by MxPx = punk
Punk Rawk Show by Lounge Freak = easylistening/lounge
now that's a switch.
pulled from a book i read recently, as the protagonist (speaking first person) finished a self-analysis of how he felt about a certain female in the same book: "...Things had looked pretty much the same the last time I had pulled a surprise inspection in the emotional barracks." --Roger Zelazny, "The Hand of Oberon"
random words pulled from five minutes i spent getting sidetracked while looking up miscellanea for the title of this blog:
errata
miscellany
durance vile (ie a prison term)
bounding main (sea/ocean)
peruse (ie read a book)
brook (brook no interference)
tonsorial (hair-cutting)
poltroon (coward)
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have I mentioned that it's been raining lately? Wilma hasn't gotten around to leaving us alone yet. she was a long time making her mind up, and spent most of that time thrashing around between here and puerto rico before finally deciding to do something. meanwhile she rained. and rained.
we were somewhat busy with a phase inspection, and oh yes, a leaking fuel bladder. have i ever mentioned how much of a sheer delight it is to come home half-soaked in turbine fuel? i haven't? that's odd.
so i spent most of the week slopping about in rubber boots and dropping my tools in three inches of water. but we got the phase done (finally) and got the tank in (on schedule, sorta. we'd planned to put it in saturday early, but got the new cell on thur instd of fri, so we bumped our sched up a day to have sat off. that didn't work, so we got it in sat late--which is either on sched, half a day behind sched, or a day anda half behind sched depnding how you look at it). surprisingly enough the tank didn't leak (i confess i wasn't extraordinarily optimisitic--this is one of those things where anything likely to go wrong probably will...)
i taxied around for fuel and just happened to notice that we'd neglected to stick the sump cock back in. that's a small valve that goes in teh very bottom of the tank to drain off water. i was glad to have caught that, since it's somewhat easier to stick the valve in while there's no fuel in the tank, rather than when there's a steady stream coming out--like sticking the nozzle on the end of a water hose while its running. joy joy.
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i was just thinking today.. (i know, it's goign to snow tomorrow), the Bible's got a LOT of stories in it. i've always been thankful for the biblical education i recieved, but despite the amount of general bible knowledge i have i still come across stories in the Bible that I either have no recollection of or (more commonly), had comepletely forgotten about.
to pick a random one, Ezekiel 8. when i read that today i could have said, "I've never read that before", except I know that I've read Ezekiel start to finish before. erg.
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today i went for a walk in the rain. leaving the apartment i headed up the streambed that runs behind our complex. er, excuse me, i meant "roadbed".
goign up was fun, coming down was wet and cold.
i've always liked hearing steady rainfall hitting foilage. in front of the apartment is all city, but behind is practically jungle. we're right on a sharp dividing line. it's relaxing to walk/drive in that direction--to so quickly disappear into the rural country setting. walking along there's just the occasional shack/dwelling perched precariously along the side of the road.
and one cannot say "precariously" with too much emphasis. a scant two hundred feet up the road and i came to the first mudslide. puddled in the road, you could see that it had been strongly liquified when it slid--there was no sloping pile, instead it was shaped more like a cow pie or wet concrete. cars had been sqeezing through on the downhill side by driving up on the verge.
all along the road there were minor slides, large areas of erosion in the road bed, and steady sheets of water across the road. i wished i owned a waterproof camera, there's one hairpin where a stream crosses the road. they put a culvert in, but the uphill side is plugged with rocks and gravel. as a result, you can see five times more water running over the road and splashing down on top of the culvert exit than you actually see coming out of the culvert.
in another place a mud slide had taken a chunk out of somebody's front yard...about twenty feet from their front porch was an abrupt slide which deposited itself on the roadsurface.
i turned around after about twenty minutes because my shirt was starting to get fairly soaked. then the wind picked up and started driving the rain and my pleasent jaunt turned less pleasant. but it was still worth the walk up and the memories it brought back of summer days after work; floating down North River in a canoe in the pouring rain and listening to the water ping off the river surface, listening to it hitting the leaves above.
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does God chuckle?
if so, what does he chuckle at?
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when i got back from my walk the juice was off, so i tagged along with sib when she went into work to pick up paul. that way i could get something done instead of sitting around wishing i had electricity. riiiiight. wound up moving equipment out of the hangar, finding higher ground to put the airplane on, and helping paul stow his plane. he said it aptly as we put prop chocks on with the wind directly out of the ESE at 15 knots gusting 25 blowing stinging droplets of rain, "i feel like i should be a tv reporter somewhere!"
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transparency.org released their corruption perceptions index for '05 today. jamaica ranks 64th out of 158 positions with a score of 3.6 (0=bad, 10=good). for comparison, the US is 17th with 7.6 (up a whopping .1 from last year). interested in not having to pay the cops off when you get stopped? move to iceland, finland, new zealand, denmark, singapore, sweden, switzerland, norway, australia, or austria for the top ten (in that order). there's only about 45 countries though, that come in above the halfway mark.
mexico and panama came in right below jamaica, which kind of surprised me. but then i hadn't figured out yet whether i thought they'd be higher or lower. jamaica actually came up about 10 places from the '04 survey, where it was ranked 74th with Gabon and Belarus.
here's the actual table: 2005 CPI
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I pulled the TV reporter stunt again this morning (i'm now on the second day (actually third, but who's counting?) of composing this). 'cept this time i was doing it in my monkey suit and a slicker. it was still doing the twenty knots gusting thirty thing with light rain (as in light quantities, not light impact speed). just as i finish my preflight i get a call from jimmy, he's telling me they're cancellign tomorrow's shipment. great, i couldn't say i was exactly jumping for joy at the idea of taking off in this muck with no weather radar (yes, that quit again), but why couldn't you cancel it three minutes ago before i took the cover off?
switching mental gears i walked over to jdf and asked them if it were okay to park infront of their building (this would put our planes in the lee shelter of their barracks building. the taf for this morning had the lovely phrases "14025G35KT" and "+TSRA SQ BKN010 BKN012CB" in it, i didn't really want my airplanes floating across the ramp into the AirJ A320 parked there. "gusts to 35 knots" didn't quite cover it, as we had one gust front go through which reduced visibility to zero and had forty knots down the runway at one point (45+ mph). Paul was chatting with a guy in the met office at cayman on monday when he was coming back... the met guy said he'd never seen tafs like that for kingston before (which might not be saying a whole lot, except i've never seen SQ in a taf here before either (squall). but then i don't remember checking them when dennis and emily came through. we do occasionally see +TSRA (heavy thunderstorms and rain), but usually for a two hour period in the afternoon, not for entire 12 hour chunks of time like htis taf (which is Terminal Area Forecast btw) was calling for.
jdf was cool (since i'm busy explaining my acronyms, this one's Jamaica Defense Force), so i grabbed the tug and pulled my plane around so it was in the lee of their barracks. then i came back over to our side and taxied jordan's plane over, since we weren't sure if we could get a dispersal flight out today (he's up right now, dodging airliners and buildups). of course it started raining in earnest as i was wrapping up, so walking back over (about 300yds) was actual effort to walk into the wind. i thought it was hailing for a bit (i've had that happen here), but it was just rain hitting the ground so hard it made the pebbles bounce. soon i had water dripping off my nose and ears and i had to keep my head down to breath. fun stuff. something to tell my grandkids about, except i'll change it to snow mixed with hail.
it looked like a blizzard later, when that gust front went through--it whipped so much water up off the lake that it looked like blowing snow. it didn't help that visibility was only about 250 metres. ah yes, and four planes stacked up on approach... making the controlers work for their money this week, that's for sure.
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this is fun: librarything.com. you can put your books on line, have your own library catalog, and see who else has the same books you do. i'm here. let me know if you stick your library here, i'm interested in seeing it.
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