No, not the 25th Infantry Division. I'm talking about the unnamed weather event that hit us last night and will probably roll across us again today.
I'm seeing a lot of hogwash online about the .30-06 cartridge being obsolete. Hogwash. The old Thirty Aught Six is an old cartridge, no doubt about that, but obsolete? Not likely.
It can still take all the game on the North American continent. There may be other cartridges that are better for a specific task, or more suited to specific game, but that doesn't make the old warhorse obsolete. It's proven itself over and over, and it is the cartridge that everyone compares against. It is a benchmark cartridge.
If I knew that I was going on a medium-to-large game hunt somewhere in North America, with no other inclination of where I would be, the old Savage 110 in .30-06 would go along, and I'd be neither under gunned nor second-guessing my choice. From deer in the thickets to moose in Alberta, the .30-06 would be just fine.
Obsolete, indeed.
The AC crew is here to install the new unit. I'm very happy with that.
I told Belle this morning that it is now illegal for me to wash dishes. When she asked "Why", I explained to her that Donald Trump had signed an executive order forbidding men from competing in women's sports.
Just so you know.
It's supposed to rain on Thursday, but it has been over ten days since I mowed. My yard holds water, and the afternoon showers have the ground saturated in sports. I decided that today would be a good chance to roll the dice and see if I stick the mower. I didn't. Got the front mowed except for the front ditch.
Tomorrow we have a contractor coming in to replace the home AC unit. It's been limping along for a while, and it is 24 years old. It's time for an upgrade. We're getting a new inside furnace and outside AC unit. The contractor told me that out present unit pulls 40 amps, and the new one should pull no more than 13 amps. That should help the electric bill quite a bit.
We have a 3-ton unit now and I asked the guy if we needed to increase the tonnage. He took a quick measure of the house and told me that 3-tons would cool and heat it just fine.
It's allpart of being a homeowner.
Waiting for the AC guy, I was surfing around and came upon some videos talking about the Air India crash. And I started wondering why MAYDAY became the universal call for distress. So, I started looking again. From Wikipedia:
The "mayday" procedure word was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport, England. He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency.[1][2] Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the term "mayday", the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aider.
And there you have it. It was phonetically distinctive and easily understood over the radios of the day. And now you know.
I was feeling good about the home AC unit until about 5:00 yesterday, when it went out again. Just dammit. I borrowed a portable AC unit and installed it in the bedroom so that Belle could sleep comfortably. Then started texting around, getting recommendations from friends.
This morning, I found a guy, recommended highly by a friend. I called him and he said that he could be here sometime early afternoon, as soon as he finishes a job, he's on just across town. That works for me. Belle and I are in she the shop, where there is plenty of air conditioning. In battling the weather it helps to have a fallback position.
Belle and I spent most of yesterday in the shop, as we usually doo. About cocktail hour, we went intot he house to find that the AC unit had quit working. I put a call in to my AC guy, not really expecting a response late on a Saturday afternoon. Well, hell. It soon got too hot, so we fell back to the shop where the AC units work. and spent the night in the shop. Noot terribly comfortable, but it beat the hell out oof sweating our butts off.
I started watching YouTube DIY videos and trying to learn what I could about modern AC units. Before lunch, second son came over and we tore the outside unit apart to do some troubleshooting. We learned that the controller and the capacitor are okay, and that the problem seemed to be in the control circuits. And, we were having a problem with a switch called the high pressure reset switch. After we got the unit torn apart, I got out the water hose and gave the condenser coil a good washing from the inside.
Just before we were about to quit in disgust, second son had the idea of turning the complete system off at the breakers, waiting five minutes, and letting the endite system reset. We tried that and it worked. When we turned the breakers back on, the system came to life. The house is cooling off slowly, and it appears that Belle will be able to sleep in her bed tonight.
I am pleased to know that the compressor is okay, the fan is working, and the controls seem to be operating for the time being. When my AC guy calls me tomorrow, I'll schedule a service, tell him everything I've done, and let him give the unit a thorough inspection. The unit has been running now for about two hours and the house is cooling down. We are spoiled to air conditioning in these latitudes and I do not apologize for that.
I was watching an interview on Fox with Kristi Noem, the DHS Secretary. She was telling Fox that DHS is making some changes in airport security, and one of those changes is that passengers will no longer be required to remove their shoes as part of the screening.
Fox asked her (and I'm paraphrasing here), but she said that she asked why removing the shoes is necessary, and evidently no one in authority had had asked that question. The answer is that the tech has gotten better and that there is no real reason to have a passenger remove their shoes.
Luckily, I don't fly much. I don't have to fly much. I used to really enjoy flying pre-9/11, but the security theater after 9/11 made me more likely to schedule a colonoscopy than an airline flight.
The bigger point of the Noem interview is that no one had asked that question. In my experience, the biggest function of leadership is to ask those questions. "Why are we doing this thing?" If the answer you get is "We've always done it like that.", then you have a problem.
There may be very good reasons why an organization does certain things. Those reasons may be regulatory, or legal, or based in logic and reason. But, if the worker bees cannot articulate good reasons, then it's time to look for alternatives.
At the very least, Kristi Noem is asking the right questions.
