I Was Chased by a Deadly Predator!

It was in the crawlspace beneath the alternative education center at Grand Prairie ISD. I was wedged tight between the muddy ground and the floor joists. The Ethernet cable in my mouth prevented my scream when I saw the world's largest spider coming right at me and that's when my flashlight failed.

What About Bob? Your Bug Out Bag or Go Bag

I was at work one afternoon when my wife called. Without peamble, she asked if I was watching the weather. Working in an IT department, my office was in the basement under a multi-story library, so I had to confess that I was not watching the weather at the moment.

Her next words spurred me into action. "Call your Mother right now and tell her to get to safety, then go look at the weather."

After dialing the number and while waiting for an answer, I keyed up the weather station on my PC. There was a huge tornado about a mile from my parent's home and they were directly in the current path. I choked a bit at my Mother's voice when she answered. "Get Dad and both of you head to the laundry room right now. There is a tornado heading your way and it looks like it will hit you in less than a minute."

Unable to do anything more, I called my wife back to thank her. We chatted for a bit as we watched the tornado bypass my parent's home (barely). When the storm was obviously not coming back, I phoned them again to see if they were okay. I asked my Mother if she was in the laundry room and she told me "No. I'm trying to find batteries for my flashlight."

Worry giving way to anger, I asked if at least my sane and rational Dad was in the laundry room. "No. He's in the living room trying to get the weather on the television. Don't worry though Jim. We'll be safe in the laundry room in just a few minutes."

We had a couple of evacuations (and failed evacuations like this one) for my family (grass fire, house fire, etc.) leading my wife and I to gift each household a "go bag". You can probably imagine what would go into a bag like this, but the point is, you have 30 seconds to leave, what are you going to take? We don't prep for hurricanes because we are hundreds of miles from the coast, but everyone needs to give consideration to their potential threat picture and plan based on that.

Lots of items are obvious and will be covered by other posters. There are a couple of specific ones we think might not be covered.

A list of phone numbers and email addresses for the extended family. The local and distant rally point for each household.

The local rally point may even be a spot in your yard. A disaster can be as simple as a fire in the home. You want a rally point where everyone heads, like the driveway entrance or other. This may prevent a loved one going back into the house from the back yard to save you while you stand safely in the street.

I would define a more distant rally point as being outside of the immediate neighborhood (beyond the effected area of a tornado or grass fire for my family).

A virtual rally point for the extended family. This consists of the name, phone#, and email address of a relative or close friend in another region or state in case there is a wide area communications breakdown. Health and Welfare messages, location, contact information can be relayed via this virtual rally point outside the affected area.

A marking chart for the front of your home. Marks that can be read from the street without making it obvious, which indicate that you have moved to a rally point and which one. This is done in our family with simple symbols so that they should be unreadable to the rest of us.

Photocopies of all important documents Drivers license, marriage license, credit card numbers and the numbers to call to cancel them. Some cash, but include a roll of quarters for vending machines if needed.

BTW: within 12 months, none of the other households in my extended family could recall where their "go bags" were, so the fresh batteries we had planned on giving to each household went to a charity that would use them.

Boredom at Sea

Boredom causes people to make bad decisions or get careless. This is to be avoided at sea.

I identified two distinct types of boredom while aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Jarvis. Benign and Malignant.

Either can be fatal, but malignant boredom is an insidious beast that causes people to deliberately do things no sane person would. For instance, we had a non-rate (non-skilled labor) assigned to laundry detail for a month. This wasn't punishment. Non-rates rotated through a variety of jobs for a month at a time. He wasn't happy doing laundry and to get out of it, he stuck his hand in the pants press, slammed it shut and hit the steam.

The results looked like boiled chicken with some skin missing and you could see his tendons moving as he wiggled his fingers. He did get out of laundry detail. In fact, it got him off the ship and into the psych ward. I never did find out what happened to his hand.

Benign boredom causes people to get careless and make mistakes. As an example, we were due to put into a Canadian port and the Captain decided the lifelines should be cleaned up. These are three heavy cables strung along the edges of the deck to keep people from falling over the side. The man assigned the job gave it some thought and decided to use a pneumatic wire wheel to clean the lines. The air hose wouldn’t reach the whole length of the deck, so he took all three lines down and coiled them on the deck. Wearing the approved eye and ear protection, he was mostly deaf and blind as he worked.

Along comes Mean Dean the Weather Machine (Marine Science Technician Dean Grieman). Dean was pretty popular among the crew even though he really was in a one man department. His daily weather reports which we all hailed as “Yesterday’s Weather Tomorrow.” Which made him about as accurate as any weather forecaster.

When not forecasting the weather, he periodically recorded the water temperatures at various depths using a disposable sensor with a coil of wire that would unwind as the probe sank. Dean could pretty well do this in his sleep and perhaps that’s why on this fateful day, he popped open the door to his office, walked over to the side of the ship and heaved the sensor over the side.

He must have been surprised when he followed the probe over the side rather than being restrained by the anticipated safety lines. Dean just managed to grab the lip of the deck on his way over.

This lip is in place to keep running rust from staining the white hull and we call it the knife edge for good reason. Dean was left hanging on for dear life yelling at the back of the sailor cleaning the lines. The pain had to be fierce as he clung there calling for help.

Only a couple of feet away, the deck hand had his back to Dean who would have been left swimming for the four minutes or so it would take the waters of the Bearing Sea to shut his conscious mind down. Dean finally managed to pull himself back up on deck and lay there completely spent for a moment.

While Dean was still laying there when the sailor cleaning the lifelines eventually paused and removed the scratched and fogged safety goggles to find the scuffed and bleeding technician laying behind him.

The evening after watching my shipmate deliberately burn his hand, I realized that I had found it entertaining. This changed my way of thinking about life as I could not have been more horrified than that moment of realization. Whatever the cause, boredom at sea can kill and I was determined to be more sympathetic to what others are going through. Perhaps more importantly, I was determined to never be bored at sea. This is why I tend to be a class clown.

True Love

I first met my wife when working at the Visitor Information Center in the Fort Worth Stockyards.   One Saturday afternoon, another volunteer called me at home to say they had a ticket to the final event of the Tuff Hedeman national bull riding championships.   It was a very expensive box seat and it would look bad if someone didn't use it.   Problem was, they only had one ticket and nobody wanted to go alone.   As a personal  favor, would I promise to use it?   I agreed, not knowing that another volunteer was calling my future bride with exactly the same story, while holding a ticket for the seat next to mine.

Carla and I chatted during the show and at one point, a 2,000lb bull tossed a 150lb cowboy about fifteen feet in the air.   The poor cowboy landed flat on his face with his hands and feet spread.   As one EMT held the victim's head immobile, the other dug a hole in the sand and bull s#$t so the poor guy could breathe.   That was when Carla turned to me and asked "Doesn't that hurt?"

I gotta tell you, it hurt all the way out to the private box seat I occupied.   I nodded and told Carla it very likely would if the guy ever recovered consciousness.

Then she gave me an in.   An opportunity to continue the light conversation of the evening.   "Why in the world do they do it then?"

I assured her I had no idea but would get back with her.   I pondered for a whole month and could find no answer.   In my frustration, I determined to call her anyway and just admit that I can't answer the question.   Hopefully she would take pity on me and we might talk for a few minutes anyway.

I looked up her number in the volunteer database but realized that would be cheating, so I got out the telephone book and looked her up.   Yep, there's the number and there is... Oops!   The listing said Carla and Henry Pugh.   I was crushed.   I was not going to get between Carla and Henry.

A few days went by and I called her one evening.   During the three hour conversation, I learned that "Henry" was her Honda car and she had used the name because of advice not to list a phone in just a woman's name.

Amplitude Modulation (AM) & Single Sideband (SSB)

When you add two frequencies together, you get both of the original frequencies as well as the sum and difference of the two.   In an AM transmitter, the carrier signal varies in strength relative to the audio input as opposed to Frequency Modulation which varies the frequency relative to the audio input.

The spoken voice is mostly between 300Hz and 3,000Hz and for the purpose of ham and CB, the audio portion of the signal will be between these two values.

In AM radio, you have the transmitter frequency (820Khz in the case of WBAP radio in Ft. Worth) You also have the sum and difference frequencies.   If you put a steady tone of 500Hz audio onto WBAP's audio input, the result would be three signals. 819.5KHz, 820Khz, and 820.5KHz.   The original audio (500Hz) is filtered out since it doesn't travel well anyway.   (click the image below to enlarge)

Radio pioneers observed that the center frequency (820KHz) contains no information, yet uses over a third of the power that is sent out to the antenna.   All of the information is contained in the side bands (sum and difference frequencies).   The below example is from an AM broadcast station which is why the upper and lower sidebands are so much wider than in amateur radio signals.   You can see at "A" the center frequency of the broadcast with a large amount of energy spent carrying no information.   The upper and lower side bands "B" carry mirror images of the data payload.

Since the side bands are mirror images of each other, they are redundant to each other.   The person transmitting Single Side Band (SSB) picks one.   In our example, the Lower Side Band (LSB) has been selected.   The person receiving needs to pick the same one or their signal becomes inverted (sounds a bit like monkey chatter).   In the LSB example below, the carrier frequency "C" has been filtered out before transmitting because it carries no data.   All of the information in the form of voice is intact in the LSB at "D".   The upper side band (USB) has been filtered out before transmitting because the information there is an entirely redundant mirror image to that contained the LSB.

Let's say you are using lower side band, sending the 500Hz tone on 820KHz. (click the image below to enlarge)

The transmitter filters out the original 500Hz audio as well as both the 820Khz carrier and the 820.5KHz upper side band reducing the amount of power needed for a given signal strength by more than two thirds.   This 819.5KHz "upper sideband" is amplified and sent to the antenna. (click the image below to enlarge)

The receiver is set to a local oscillator frequency of 820KHz.   The received signal comes in at 819.5KHz and combined with the local oscilator signal.   This again results in three frequencies. 500Hz (difference), 820KHz (local oscillator), 819.5Khz (received signal), and 1,639.5KHz (sum). (click the image below to enlarge)

The receiver filters out everything above 3,000Hz (the top of the voice range) and you are left with the 500Hz difference signal. (click the image below to enlarge)

In SSB mode, the transmitter is putting out almost no power when the microphone is keyed as long as there is no sound picked up by the microphone.   In an AM transmitter, you still have more than 1/3 of the peak power being transmitted as long as the microphone is keyed regardless of whether there is any sound.

The Old Man at the Cafe

I was sitting at a diner this morning working my way through a body sculpting breakfast of bacon and cheddar omelet with hash browns and a side of biscuits and gravy. Breakfast was washed down with enough hot coffee to fill the gas tank on my Sportster outside.

I felt sorry for the really old guy facing me from the far end of the counter. Years of hard living and bad choices were etched in the deep lines on his face. His long white beard provided ample evidence that his best years were lost on the road behind him.

Then the waitress sprayed glass cleaner on what I now realized was a mirror at the far end of the counter and my whole day kind of turned sour.

New Bike

I should have realized it was going to be one of those days. Early that morning, Susie and I went out for breakfast at a little cafe diner where the waitress told me they were "out of bacon". I'm pretty sure there has never been a cafe in the history of the republic that ran out of bacon, but there it was.

I live in a state where there is neither season or bag limit on bacon. You can hunt bacon with guns, traps, and even poisons. Bacon is the only thing you can legally hunt in Texas from a helicopter, but this diner was out. What a way to start the day.

I picked up the new bike Tuesday morning. I had arranged to drop my truck by earlier because I knew from experience they would have a goody bag full of stuff to send home with me.

Walked into the dealership with a stack of cash and thought I would be out of there in 15 minutes. Nope. Finance manager had to go over all the options with me, then accessories 'girl' had to show me all the latest branded merchandise and clothing, then the parts man had to introduce me to their ordering system (something I'm all too familiar with). Finally the service manager had to show me around (already been there too). Meanwhile, the bike is presumably being prepped and washed.

A few minutes after the grand 45 minute tour, my bike was parked out front and ready to ride. As soon as they got some photos of the new owner of course. During the photos, I pointed out to the salesman that the bike was awful dusty to have just been washed and he frowned and promised to chew out those prep guys.

I rode the bike around the block and back. I walked back in and told them the speedometer wasn't working. This led to the general manager, half the sales force and the entire service department taking turns riding my new bike in order to verify the problem really existed and that none of them could immediately see the problem. Several guessed blown fuse, one read the engine diagnostics code and assured everyone the speedo was bad. Fortunately they had one in stock and after a 45 minute wait for the engine to cool down (the speedo connects way deep inside the hot bits) they discovered the original speedo was simply not plugged in.

Once again, I strapped the helmet on and rode...

...around the block. Now there was a brand new scratch on the gas tank applied by one of the many people who had ridden my bike more than I had been allowed at this point. An hour of buffing, polishing and cleaning later, I rode away once again. This time into pouring rain.

A couple of hours later I walked back in the front door of the dealership shaking my head and mumbling to myself. I avoided eye contact with the salesmen, who all rose from their desks and followed me. Same thing with the clothing and accessories girls who didn't even try to hide the worry on their faces. The parts guy and GM both tried to intercept me on the way by but had to fall in line behind the other employees.

Reaching the service department, the service manager saw the lynch mob behind me and said; "My God! What is it this time?"

I Turned a complete circle to make eye contact with everyone before I replied; "This time my wife had to drive me up here and drop me off..."

As I paused, you could almost smell the panic in the room as they waited for the final blow "...so I could pick up my truck."

You know? For such a friendly bunch of people, they sure seemed happy to see me leave. For all the problems we had that day, the folks at Paris Harley-Davidson were there for me, kept me informed of the status, and made me feel good about the whole experience.

Eye Doctor

"It's OK buddy, don't cry. One day maybe you'll get a real bike like the rest of us." I was quoting a riding buddy in a conversation with my new eye doctor.

I found myself in his chair Saturday because I needed a new prescription for disposable contact lenses. Super nice guy, but I couldn't help being nervous about the questions.

"What kind are you currently using?"... "I see, well those haven't been manufactured for over fifteen years. Can you tell me when they were prescribed? Eighteen years ago? They don't last that long though..."

It didn't please him at all to find out that I wore them until they tore or built up so much of a texture that they woudln't stay put. This was often over a year.

Then the questions about how I cared for them started. What brand of saline are you using? Coffee? Promise me you'll never re-hydrate your dried lenses by dipping them in your coffee cup. Yes, I understand the coffee is hot, but it still isn't sterile."

The worst moment was when I told him that if one comes out on the highway, I just pop it in my mouth and try to remember not to chew until I get to the next rest stop. He looked at my much-used motorcycle gloves stuffed in the helmet and turned pale.

I went on to explain that one motorcycle trip I had jalapenos for lunch. When I popped the contact back in my eye tears flowed for something like 20 minutes. That's when my motorcycle buddy mistook my reaction to the peppers for an emotional response to finding myself on the smallest Harley in the group.

The way I see it is your eyes are a moist membrane exposed to everything in the air around you. When someone sneezes, it gets into your eyes. Someone blows cigarette smoke, it gets in your eyes, etc. I'm not suggesting anyone abuse their eyes or any other part of their body, but don't get paranoid.