It’s Veteran’s Day, and I took a day off from work.  To celebrate, I’m going to relive some of the best moments from my glory days.

Here’s my agenda:

• Take a perfectly clean rifle out of the safe and spend a few hours ‘cleaning’ it before presenting it to someone who hates me with the fire of a thousand suns for ‘inspection’.
• Get into a spotlessly clean and pressed suit of clothing, complete with immaculately shined footwear, then climb around a greasy, dirty truck for an hour while filling out paperwork that will be glanced at and thrown into the trash.
• Remove everything from my basement, sort it out into neat lines, and have the neighbor check to make sure I haven’t lost anything since the last time I opened up the storage room.
• Lock a craggy old fart who’s too old for this shit into a room with an enthusiastic college senior who thinks he’s Patton.  Take side bets on which one survives the encounter.
• Pack everything I need to survive for a year into two small bags, carry it all to the end of a runway, then sit and wait in the rain until told that the op’s been cancelled and there’s an equipment inspection in the morning.
  • Repeat that last step while blind drunk at 2 the next morning because you never know when you’ll need to do it for real.
• Spend weeks planning something really, really important and extremely fun, including travel and lodging arrangements and a list of interesting people that you want to meet and have long conversations with, then cancel it after your plane has taken off because some pissants in some 3rd world shithole decided to have a ‘peaceful election’ and form a ‘democratic government’.
  • Spoil sports
• Pack a briefing room full of guys from upstate New York, Michigan, North Dakota, and Alaska for four hours and teach them how to stay warm and dry in the winter.
• Pack the same room full of native Texans and Arizonans and teach them about surviving the heat.
• Teach about both heat and cold injuries after issuing a complete set of cold-weather gear to two Air Force guys and telling them to walk two miles for chow.
• Be called fat and out of shape by someone who got carried by a fat and out of shape dude after she passed out carrying 20% of her body weight up the side of a relatively long, steep mountainside.
  • It’s OK, she only weighed about as much as my rucksack did. Soaking wet.  Holding a brick.

• I started a new injection today for my arthritis.  Possible side effects are ravenous hunger, abnormal hair growth, irritability, and an aversion to silver.
  • Am I the only one craving really, really rare lamb right now?
• DaddyBear’s Maxim of Yard Work – Do not mow the lawn until after Memorial Day and do not rake leaves until after the first wind storm.
  • However, if it’s snowing, you better be out there shoveling while it’s still coming down.
• I told my boss the other day that I was officially changing my title to “Designated Guilty Bastard”.
  • He may have thought I was joking.
  • If the reward for doing a job well is more of that job, I just be doing pretty good.
• We turned on the furnace for the first time tonight.
  • Apparently, we were also making a burnt offering to some arcane deity in our ductwork.
  • Usually, we get a couple months of fall between turning off the air conditioning and turning on the furnace.  This year, we got a week and a half.
• I was feeling pretty good about Boo and I getting out of the house this morning.  No bad attitude, no sharp words. We even got in the truck ahead of schedule.  We had a few extra minutes to listen to a Larry Correia audiobook and talk about the day before the doors to school opened.
  • Truly, it was a great way to start the morning.
  • Then Boo got out and noticed that he’d forgotten his lunch on the counter.
  • Oh, well, there are worse things to forget.  One of his uncles once forgot his left shoe and didn’t realize it until he was halfway to school.

• For the first time in 25 years, I have taken one of my sprogs fishing and been able to get my own hook wet.  I will call that a victory.
• There is nothing like the feeling you get when your wife notices a juvenile raccoon pushing its head through a previously overlooked hole in the screen door.
  • It had a sibling.
  • Hijinks ensued.
  • When I spoke to the maintenance fellow at the lake resort about it, he chuckled and said we were lucky it wasn’t a bear.
• On a related note, I told Irish Woman that she could only adopt a raccoon if she promised to sit on the porch and drink beer with it on hot Kentucky afternoons.
• If you’re going to fish at the bottom of a big dam, you better keep an ear open for the warning sirens.
  • If you are in a boat and do not heed the warning sirens, you better be pretty good at handling your boat in rough water.
• Irish Woman and I thought Rock House was really neat, until we realized that we were about 10 miles downstream from the dam.  That would be the dam we saw them open the gates on an hour earlier, causing the river level to rise several feet in about two minutes.
  • The mud 20 yards up from the river, dotted with dead minnows, during a time when we hadn’t gotten rain in weeks, convinced us that we shouldn’t linger.
• Note to self – When visiting a distillery, visit the gift shop before going to the bar.  It gets a tad expensive when you do it the other way ’round.
• During out meander south, we visited one of my favorite gun stores.
  • I took a long look at a Mossberg in 20 gauge for Boo.  One may be following us home soon.
  • Ruger has apparently caught lightning in a bottle with the Wrangler, its new single-action .22 revolver.   I am currently number 30 on the waiting list and should have the revolver I bought last week sometime around Christmas.
• Remember what I said about getting a suppressor?  Yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever have that much disposable income.
  • Yet another example of government regulation making something that should be inexpensive and convenient costly and a pain in the butt.
• Our 15th anniversary is coming up in a month or three.  That’s the ‘crystal’ anniversary.  I already know what I’m getting Irish Woman.  She has no idea what to get me, but I told her that the finely ground glass in a good rifle scope might count.

• For once, air travel was quite pleasant.
  • Seriously, even the TSA people were pleasant and helpful.
  • I can’t even complain about New Jersey drivers, much. The drive between Newark airport and undisclosed location was, for the most part, uneventful.
• I do believe, however, that I shall never frequent the hotel I stayed at again.  It wasn’t the condition of the room (mediocre), the dearth of water warmer than piss, or even the lack of pressure for said piss-warm water.  It was the fire alarm sounding at odd times, usually when I was trying to sleep.
• Scheduling a conference in Manhattan on the same day that the United Nations was meeting was probably not the best move somebody could have made.  Looking on the bright side, I got an opportunity to observe New York street life for three hours as we crept along through traffic.
  • Some people call it The Big Apple. I’m thinking it’s more like the The Big Anthill.  How can so many people stand being so close to each other?
• Newark is one of those cities where there are islands of good places, surrounded by high fences and unarmed guards, in a sea of crackheads, strip clubs, and burned out cars.
  • Seriously, I expected to see roving bands of undead to complete the scene