Old Friends

Well, Campers, it's been a pretty exciting week around here since last we spoke.  For example, it's been a "Winter in Texas" week.  Friday the high was 73 on my highly accurate truck thermometer.  Sunday when we got up to go to Mass, it read 28.  But at least the wind was blowing so it felt quite a bit colder.

As the man says, if you don't like the weather in Texas, wait five minutes, it'll change.

Speaking of Sunday and in response to Sarge's post, I offer this.

Mustache AND a beard (the beard is still a work in progress),  Photo was taken at 0655 Sunday morning as I was consuming a coffee and reading his post.  Tuna, the balls in your court.

In a post a week or three ago, I had mentioned I was going to try my hand at turning an "Inside Out" ornament on the lathe.  I've used this site as my "teacher".  Learned a lot from him, and decided to get started.

 Did a pretty good job on the inside portion of the ornament.  The next step is to take the four pieces and rotate them so that the hole is now in the center of the rectangle.  Glue the pieces together and then turn the now outer side to the shape you want.  

Well...

Very shortly after I began turning it, it started to wobble and as I started to reach for the OnOff switch, the wood shattered and went flying across the shop.  Fortunately, my cranium was below the flight path of the wood and, therefore, is still intact.

No Blood, No Foul.  But, I'm going to do quite a bit more research on the "How To" portion of this mission before I start this type project again.  More to follow.

Shifting gears, earlier in the week on Sarge's Blog, we had had a scintillating conversation about insignia and patches and quality thereof, I went lookabout for the various insignia I had worn.

It was kinda interesting.

The top row is the Patch of the Command I was assigned too when I wore the patches in the second row.  L to R: Air Training Command, Tactical Air Command and Pacific Air Force.  The next row is the patch of the unit I was assigned to when I was in that Command.  Left to right, My UPT Class patch ("Beat's workin' for a livin' is the slogan at the top), my F-4 Training Squadron, the 80th TFS "The Juvat's" patch, my F-4 Moody Squadron, my AT-38 Holloman Squadron, my F-15 Training squadron, my  F-15 Eagle squadron at Kadena.  Bottom row, My TAC Nametag, My Juvat nametag, My TAC nametag, My Eagle Nametag and finally the nametag I wore at the Puzzle palace . (For the curious, that's located in DC and has 5 sides.)

Quite a bit of nostalgia there.

Which kinda enticed me to search through my old computer files from back in the day.  Boy, did I find a treasure!  

While I was flying Eagles on Okinawa, one of the guys in the squadron was big into making home movies.  I found some of them in my hard drive. One in particular got to me.  It's a 4 v 4 Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT) fight against the Aggressors in F-5s.  Spud, the creator of the movie, was in the Back Seat of a very special Eagle.  Mine! 78-564. My name was on the canopy rail.

Now, this was in the days of the shoulder mounted movie camera, mind you.  So, we're not talking perfect film quality, nor was he doing much filming during the fighting.  (You try holding one of those up when the jet is pulling 9g). Many of the actual fighting scenes were cut and pasted into the video from the gun camera films taken during various additional DACT fights (which included F-4s and F-106s Mirage III's, My Bad, No 106's in the Pacific). Your humble scribe also has a few cameo scenes in it.  I was # 4 in the four ship.  

All told, watching that video, solidly brought forth a "Damn! I wish I was doing that again!

In any case, for your viewing pleasure.

Have a good week, my Friends!