Sorry for the two week interruption.
The first week was that I was in Pensacola, Fla working with my two brothers on fixing up my nephew’s house in order to put it on the market.
David, Jon & I were working on David’s son, Michael’s house as he prepares to move back to Calif (and back to the reserves from Active Duty in the Navy). David was responsible for creating the shirts, with the inscription created by our sister Jill. I’ll spare you the somewhat politicized front of the shirt which offer encouragement to some unknown Brandon. This is the first time, I think, that all 3 of us worked on a project together.
I didn’t take any pictures of the actual work we did, I’ll leave that to Jon, but it was basically reworking the downstairs bath and making it an ensuite bath (since there was another bathroom downstairs).
I too had a connection to Pensacola, in 1969-1970 I spent a year there, after ET-A School, learning the ins and outs of being a CT(M). (If you’d like a detailed explanation of what the bundle of acronyms actually means I could arrange it; but it will cost you at least 2 and possibly 3 margaritas)
We took Wednesday off, and I revisited Corry Field where I was stationed back in 1969. Back then it was a disused subsidiary airfield of NAS Pensacola, used for training during WWII. After the war it was converted to training the various branches of Communicatons Technicians in the big brick hangers that were left over from being an airfield. (Hangers also served as emergency shelters when Hurricane Camille blew through, with the emphasis on “blew”).
Corry Field is obviously changed in the last 53 years, the runways are gone; supplanted by Navy Exchange and Commissary for the whole region, but the old buildings are still there, tucked in amongst the newer stuff. We also drove over to NAS Pensacola to visit the National Naval Aviation Museum. The Museum was truly amazing. It has representative of all the aircraft flown by the navy, and others. In my first pass through the ground floor, while examining a WWII era PBY (with sections cut away so you can see the insides) I completely missed an adjacent Messerschmidt Me-262. I noticed it on our second pass through the area. One sad part is that post-9/11, the general public no longer has access to it since it was built directly adjacent to the Blue Angels compound and the initial pilot training area. Since both Jon & I have retired ID’s and David has a disabled veteran ID we had no problems.
We finished up Saturday morning (19 Feb) and Jon gave me a ride to the airport. I noticed that morning I woke up with a scratchy throat. I got back to Casper a little after 8:00PM to cold snowy weather. By the next afternoon I definitely had case of influenza (pre-COVID idiocy) symptoms, low grade fever, coughing, and general malaise. I treated it like I did for every cold for the past 60 years: OJ, supplemental Vitamin C, rest and gin & tonic (for the additional Vitamin C from the limes and anti-malarial properties of tonic water-just in case). I didn’t get any worse and now it’s Friday and I am back to reasonable health (other than being on Day 2 of the War in Ukraine).
Speaking of the Ukraine War, I had gotten some stuff from The Great Courses website over the years, and today they sent me a link to a section of their Eastern European History. It’s only a half hour in time but explains an enormous amount. See LINK Here.