Well it’s just after 3 in the morning and I guess now would be a good time to post something. All the work for tonight is finished. All the early outs for the morning are pulled and fueled and ready to go. That is the good thing about it finally being nice outside in the night time. You don’t have to worry about frost on the windows or stuff in the plane freezing and exploding so you can get stuff done at your leisure. All I have to worry about when I do that is thunderstorms but the weather says zero percent chance of that until at least six am so nothing to worry about there. I am working the ramp this week which I generally like more than working the phones. I honestly don’t know what to tell these people at 3 am when they call saying that the part we sent is radioactive and it doesn’t have the correct paperwork to get it on an airplane after being unloaded off the truck. What?

In about a month they will be changing everyone’s shift to the new schedule to remove the 16 hour shifts because of “the Challenger incident”. I really don’t see how the new schedules fix anything. Changing from a 16 to a 14 hour shift? Really, after a certain amount of time what’s a couple of hours? The real problem was having graves guys do tight hangar dumps without adequate spotters at a point in the overnight when the human body is naturally at it’s most tired. The 16 hour shifts back to back really didn’t have much to do with it. I work 8 hour shifts and between 4 and 6 am I get sleepy even though I am used to the shift. Oh well, you know the old saying. One person shits their pants, everyone gets to wear diapers. This is Matt’s legacy that he leaves us after he’s gone to be an mechanical engineer in Wichita. Up yours Matt you stupid lemon eater! Anyway my shift won’t change that much. My Sunday overnight turns into Friday afternoon and the rest stays the same. Still kind of sucks though, I like just working all overnights. Oh well, no point in getting upset about it, it won’t change anything.

I am going to try and make the effort to do some sort of physical activity for an hour a day every day just so I can try and get back into something that resembles being in shape. Doesn’t matter what it is. I did the basketball tournament on Saturday (which granted, wasn’t that much of a workout because i hardly played) and rode the bike with the dog later in the day. Sunday it was hard to get going because my back was hurting but I did manage to go out and get the lawn all mowed. I don’t know if that technically counts but I am going to count it anyway. I think tomorrow I will go down to coddington park before school lets out to shoot some baskets. Gotta work on my game. I see Duncan is having some sort of Ironman thing, maybe I will try to get in on that. It’s not like a real ironman or anything. From what I get from the email you get a team together and you have 2 weeks to get all the stuff done with different team members doing different things. Doesn’t sound that bad. Or maybe I’m wrong and you have to do it all yourself. In that case I won’t be participating even though their offer of a “Dri-fit Wellness Wearable” for completion is quite tempting. I don’t even know what that is for sure, some kind of t-shirt. I am a sucker for those though.

Well we had the Duncan Aviation basketball tournament this morning and we won! And by we I mean I rode the pine the majority of the time while the Burhoop brothers and Mike ran the table in the eight team double elimination tournament. I played the role of the short blond kid in Hoosiers or maybe Rudy. You know, emotional support, clapping when our team scores, and looking around and going “me?” when subbing in. I really didn’t play that much which to tell you the truth didn’t bother me a whole lot. I am under no illusions that I have any game any more. Not after not playing for over a decade. I’m a team player and my role in this one was just to be there in case someone turned an ankle or testicle or something. I need to get back in the gym and get back into shape. Playing basketbrawl every day was one of the things that I really used to enjoy doing but I am so out of shape now and I am disgusted by how much I suck. Not to mention the fact that my back hurts so bad and I can’t bend around that much now trying to get rebounds. Sucking so bad makes me want to get back into shape and start playing again but I will have to change my game from the old days. No more playing in the paint and getting the shit kicked out of me, hell I hardly played today and by back is jacked up again. I’ll have to take the old man route and stick with the coffin nails from outside the three point line. Those are real killers, hell, someone won with one today. Anyway I didn’t school anyone or throw down any dunks. Exactly zero points scored, fouled hard a couple times and a couple rebounds. I also didn’t get a t-shirt which is the universal proof of participation, those went to the runners up but I did get a $20 gift certificate to Scheels and a red Duncan Aviation coozy. Score!

I do feel sorry for Justin though, he worked a 16 hour shift yesterday, got off at 6am this morning, slept for an hour, came to the tournament at 8:30 played until 12:30, home to shower then back to work at 2 for another 16 hour shift. Ouch. Well its the weekend, hopefully he disappears to nap in the van this afternoon and overnight he can get 3 or 4 hours in. Well thats all I’ve got for now, I’m in the middle of two whole days off and I think I’m going to go ride the bike and run the dog alongside to get him some exercise.

Since I’m just sitting around here at work waiting for the phone to ring I thought I would critique some of the artwork around the lobby. I’ll put it below so the pictures don’t load up on the main page and slow it down. The titles given are not the actual titles of the artworks, just the way I think they should be titled.

(Read on …)