Huey Lewis & The News

The concert last night was very nice. There were lots of excited moms and kids and Huey Lewis put on a great show. I had forgotten exactly how many songs they have put out over the years. It was a great trip back to the 80's for me.

They opened with "Heart of Rock & Roll" and we also heard "Doing It All For My Baby", "The Power Of Love", "Hip To Be Square", "I Want A New Drug", and many others. Here are a few pictures from the show.

All in all, it was a great show and I would go see them again in a second. Hope everyone else has had a good weekend.

Port Royal Drydock Photos

The USS Port Royal has entered drydock for repairs. You can see the sonar dome and the ship looks a bit banged up. Here is a link to a photo on Strategy Page of the USS Port Royal in drydock.

This photo gallery from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin has two pictures of the USS Port Royal in drydock after the grounding and one picture of it the last time she left drydock.

I think the link to the Star-Bulletin is acting kind of screwy. Here are some better photos from Navy.mil

Picture of the screws

View of the stern while in drydock

View of the bow

Port Royal on the rocks

Washington Floods and Pictures

I just got back home from visiting my parents. You may have seen on the news over the last few days that Washington has been hit rather hard with flooding. My parents live near some of the hardest hit areas. Thankfully, while the town that they live in was surrounded by flood waters, the town itself came through pretty well. We were just cut off for a day or so. We had to take a fairly long detour around the flooding today so that they could drop me off at the airport this morning.

They are calling this "Historic" flooding and "Record" flooding. They used to call these sorts of floods "Hundred Year Flood" and "Five Hundred Year Flood", but since we have had several of them over the last few decades, I guess they decided to stop calling them that. In this case, we had about 7 feet of snow fall in the mountains over the course of a week. This was followed by a rain storm from Hawaii that brought warm air and huge rainfalls. Some areas of western Washington had 10 inches of rain fall in a single day.

The liberal media, liberal scientists, liberal engineers, and all the other members of the so-called Reality Based Community blame the floods and land slides on over-development in the areas that used to be flood plains, too much tree clear-cutting, and climate change. I haven't heard too many conservative theories on why the flooding has been so much worse, so I assume the conservatives blame the flooding and land slides on excessive corporate tax rates, over-regulation of the free market, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore. I guess the good folks of the Westboro Baptist Church probably blame it on the two lesbians that were kissing at a Seattle Mariners game at Safeco Field last year.

I don't know all the reasons for the flooding being so much worse than it used to be, but I do know that when you have too much water in too small of an area, the water gets real high real quick.

I have a few pics from the area around Oakville.

Water Over Roadway...Duh!!!



This road was damaged when some wet soil under the road collapsed.



This picture shows the land slide underneath the road.

White Christmas

I had a great view of a White Christmas when I looked out my window this morning. Having a White Christmas is not unusual here. Before moving to Pullman, I had lived on tropical islands for ten straight years and I never missed the snow. I used to do a very small amount of skiing in the winter, but it never really appealed to me. I always preferred golf and a little bit of scuba diving. Tropical islands are more conducive to golf and scuba diving than the winter wonderland that I live in now.

I have taken my car out for a few short trips. Enough to ensure me that the battery is not dead and that I can get around town without too much difficulty. Some of my neighbors have not moved their cars since the snow started falling a few weeks ago. I don't think they will be moving them anytime soon.

Of course, the snow is pretty to look at. These are a few pictures from the apartment complex that I live in. It is a little more pleasant to look at these trees than it is to contemplate digging your car out of a thick blanket of snow.

If you are living someplace without a White Christmas, your welcome to come visit and take as much snow as you like home with you. I've had plenty. I hope that everyone has a wonderful holiday season. Merry Christmas.

Photos of Russian Ship in Panama Canal

I found a few photographs of the Russian navy ship, the Admiral Chabanenko going through the Panama Canal. It was a night-time crossing and I think the pics are pretty nice. The links are below.

Reuters

Times of India Slide Show

Looked pretty cool. I went through The Ditch back in 1989. I thought it was a pretty big deal. We went through with a lot of security. I remember that we had a helicoptor or two with us the whole time and a few Boston Whalers equipped with big guns and filled with some pretty mean looking dudes. I was 20 years old at the time. Seeing all the security was the first time it was driven home for me that we were a serious military target and it was kind of a sobering experience for me.

Of course, I just loved the experience of going through the Panama Canal. It was definitely one of the more memorable days that I spent in the navy. Some pictures from navsource.org below show my first boat, the USS Shark (SSN-591) transiting the canal in '89. I don't know if I appear in any of these pictures, but I remember being on the fairwater planes while going through one of the locks. I really enjoyed being able to go out on the fairwater planes when we were on the surface. If you ask me, the classes of submarines without easy access to the fairwater planes really shortchange their sailors.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Update 11:00 p.m. : Looks like the links to the pics of my old boat may not be working. If you want to look, go to navsource.org and look at pics for the USS Shark (SSN-591). Sorry.

Photos of USS Parche Sail

The sail for the USS Parche is the centerpiece of a Navy Museum between the Bremerton ferry terminal and the entrance to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. I know it is not new, but I thought some people might be interested in seeing a few pictures of it. I think they did a pretty nice job with the display. I heard that the real reason for this area is a buffer zone to provide greater protection for the shipyard, but they "beautify" the area to make it a little less obvious that it is there to provide protection from possible terrorist threats. It would be fitting for the Parche to be used in a continuation of national defense. The biggest drawback right now is that I had to run through a mouse maze of construction and temporary fences and dodge a little traffic to get from the ferry terminal to the Parche sail.

Pictures of the sail of the USS Parche, the most decorated ship in the navy.

Boat Ride

Last Tuesday, I left Bremerton on the ferry to Seattle. I was thinking that it would be a nice ride instead of taking a drive through Tacoma. It turned out to be a pretty uneventful, yet relaxing start to my trip back to Pullman.

Barely.

I had a pretty flexible schedule, so I wasn't in a big rush to catch the boat and ended up on the 11:30 sailing. If I had waited for the next sailing, it would have been much more exciting. Someone in Bremerton phoned from a 7-11 that he had overheard two men talking about a bomb that had been planted on the ferry. The ferry returned to Bremerton and the terminal was closed. They had a few Coast Guard boats to provide security, Washington State Patrol with bomb-sniffing dogs, and several news helicopters. I heard on the radio that since the ferry never turned, it pulled up to the pier oriented so that all of the vehicles had to back off the ferry instead of driving forward. I think it would have ended up costing me several hours of travel time had I been on that ferry.

Link to the story

Of course, I would have got some more interesting photos. Here are a few pics from the ride to Seattle. Did you know that the Garmin has the ferry route programmed into it? I didn't. For some reason, I thought that was pretty cool.

Here is a picture of some scenery.

Coming into Seattle.

My Garmin faithfully guiding me to Seattle on the ferry, slightly to right of track.

Russian Submarine Photos

This is a series of pictures taken during Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's tour of the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine Svyatoy Georgiy Pobedonosets.

Link to Photos

I notice that even the Commander-in-Chief is wearing a name tag on his jacket. I think it is interesting to see how the other half lives. They do seem to have much nicer coffee cups (teacups actually) than I remember having in the crews mess. How many of those do you suppose end up at the bottom of the harbor?