I don't know if I told this one before but today one of the more humorous things that happened to me back in my Navy days came back to me.  The air conditioning in my classroom was not working so well today and the classroom was a little stuffy so during one of the breaks I went outside to get some air and saw one of the LPD's leaving port.  It brought back memories of something that happened back in 1990 just before we left for Operation Desert Shield.

It was October of 1990 and we had received orders to deploy early in December, so they moved all of our inspections up to the month of October so we would be ready to deploy in December instead of our regular deployment that was to start in May.  We had several underway hoops to jump through at the time such as our Propulsion Readiness Exam, Refresher Training and Amphibious Refresher Training.  We were going out to sea every Monday and returning every Friday, if we returned that week at all.

One Monday was overcast pretty much like it is here today.  Also being late in the year and the fact that we were getting underway early in the morning had me driving to work with my headlights on. 

I got to the ship, made sure the underway check off list was completed and then went and manned my sea and anchor detail station on the bridge of the ship.  As we were getting underway I happened to glance over at the parking lot and low and behold there was a car parked there with the lights turned on.  What was worse was, that it was my car. 

I remember calling the wife when we pulled in that Friday asking her to bring the jumper cables and her car.  She always hated coming to the base, especially since she never knew when I would be able to leave the ship.

I think that was the last time I ever left my lights on, and of course with today's cars you get an audible alarm if you try and get out and you left them on.  I sure wish they had had those alarms back then.

Last night after getting off work I cruised by the post office and paid all my bills.  I then went home and since I was feeling a little tired and my stomach felt acidic I took some antacid and ate a very light meal. 

I actually took a little nap in my chair while waiting for Laila to come on line.  When Laila did come on line again she had a bad connection.  We had been discussing that she drop PLDT and have her go with Bayantel and she finally decided to do it. 

I have to say that she has given PLDT every chance in the world to fix her service.  Lately they have not been answering their trouble call line, and if she is lucky enough to get a hold of someone there she feels like they are ignoring her problem since she has complained too often.

This morning when I got up and chatted with her she said she spent two hours at their office yesterday to complain about no dial tone on her phone and her very slow DSL bandwidth speed.  While there she talked to a few other customers and they were all upset.  None had dial tones, and Laila actually talked one person out of subscribing to their DSL service.

Laila has been a good and loyal customer.  She pays her bills in advance and hates the fact that when she changes her service, she will get a new number.  But a new number that is in service and works is better than a number that all her friends know, but don't work.  All she will have to do is notify her friends and family of the new number once she gets it.

Laila is still going to the gym almost every day and has been taking the kids.  She comes in and gets on line just about the time I get up in the morning.  She is usually still out of breath when she comes on line, but I am glad she is doing it.  Not just for her figure but for her general health. 

We checked out a few websites yesterday about better diets and stuff.  I guess I had better not drink as much soda as I do.  I don't drink much in the way of Coke and Pepsi.  But I drink many cans of Sunkist Orange.  At my age I had better slow that down and drink more fruit juices and Gatorade.

Well I guess that is about it for now.  My students are at Naval Military Training and should be returning to class soon, so I will have to go ahead and get to work soon.  Also I don't like to do this during working hours, so I do it before work, on breaks, or during lunch.

I hope everyone has a great week.

Last night Laila and I watched Television for a change of pace.  We watched House, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Crossing Jordan, the news and the first hour of War of the Worlds.  It was fun to just take a break and kick back watching television for a change.

I went to bed a little late, but got up on time.  After getting ready for work and getting some coffee I went in and was going to chat with Laila, but I found that she was not on line.  I tried chat and Skype, but no answer.  Finally I sent her a Chikka text message and she had been there all the time.  Her son had messed with her volume controls and she hadn't heard me. 

We recited the rosary and then I left for work about five minutes early, because it was raining.  That seldom happens here and when it does there are many more accidents than usual.  The traffic was worse than usual but not as bad as I have seen it in the past, so I got to work early.  That was good since it gave me a chance to get my end of the month paperwork ready to drop off at the office. 

I taught all morning and we managed to get a bit ahead, so I gave the students the afternoon off.  I saw some things that I need to get done with the equipment before we get into the labs.  That will give me the afternoon to get ready for that.

Besides that, the change in the weather has had its regular impact on my back and so I am a little sore today.  I will live with the soreness and it is only a little inconvenience. 

Yesterday was kind of funny.  Judy had trimmed all the dogs except one, since he kept snapping at her.  She did manage to get all but the side of his face and his legs done, but she was worried about getting bitten so she waited until yesterday to finish him up.  He again snapped at her, so we went ahead and put a makeshift muzzle on him and she was able to get him done.  He didn't like it one bit, but now he is done.  It was kind of amusing watching him try to get away though.  He did manage to escape twice, but there was no place for him to go so we caught him pretty easily.

I guess that is about it for today.  When I get out of here today I have to drop by the post office to mail my bill payments off, then I will stay in the house and off the roads.  It is really unsafe to drive here when it rains, mainly due to others trying to go too fast.

I hope everyone has a great workweek.

Well last night I spent the entire night trying to get the game that Laila sent me via Fedex to run online.  We worked and worked, and then when we couldn’t get it to work we contacted the game site and found that they do not accept IP’s from outside of the Philippines.

I guess I will play it when I visit again in September.  It was a lot of fun though trying to get it to work.  It has been a while since I had to play around with installing software and working with windows, so it gave me a nice review of using the different commands and all.

The kids and I after eating Chinese takeout last night sat down and watched America’s Got Talent as a family and that was a lot of fun.  I am glad they are going to invite some of the highest vote getters back for a wild card game as a lot of acts made it to the finals that I do not think should have won.  There were also a few that I felt should have made it that did not.

Laila could not watch last night because even though her Internet is back up it was very unstable.  Hopefully they will get her fixed up over the next couple of days.

This morning when I got up my PC was giving me a hard time.  I think it was all the stuff I did to it while trying to get the game to work.  I will go ahead and remove it today when I get home.

I guess that is all for now.  Once I get done teaching today I have a few errands to run and then will try and take it easy over the weekend.  I hope everybody has a fine weekend.

This morning I got up a bit early, made my breakfast and coffee, and then found out Laila's Internet was still down.  Actually it was up for a few minutes last night but Pearl plugged in the phone line and everything went dead.  I hope they get it fixed soon because this time she went right to the PLDT office and filed her trouble call.

After I sent her a message via text mail to her cell phone, she gave me a call on her cell phone.  Her sister, a friend, her daughter and her kids were all on the way home from the gym.  I guess everyone's weight loss plan is working well.  They have all lost weight, and I am so happy that they are all very interested in it and are having fun.

Since Laila couldn't be on, I went ahead and recited the rosary by myself.  I guess it rained in some places last night and they had traffic problems on all the major freeways.  I am sure glad I don't travel that far in the mornings via freeway.

On the radio for the second day in a row Rick Roberts had the father of the children he managed to get out of Lebanon on, so I switched over to Laura Ingraham and she was addressing illegal immigration with the Lt. Governor of Maryland. 

I guess the folks near Washington DC and a few counties near the eastern coast have had it and are demanding something be done about it.  He talked about Reagan's amnesty program and the great failure it turned out to be. 

I liked the way he put it.  If you are in a boat and the boat springs a leak do you fix the leak or do you just bail out the water.  You fix the leak of course, and then remove the water.  We have to fix the leak that allows these folks to come in, and then worry about guest worker programs and things like that.

He said that there is one thing that congress is not too good at and that is multitasking.  They have to treat this as to separate issues, first border enforcement and then guest worker stuff.

A few months ago I blogged about all the cars I saw in the parking lot of Paradise Valley Hospital had Mexican plates and I complained about a person driving erratically that almost caused a wreck going to the same hospital.  The other night I heard that they may have to close down the emergency rooms of Paradise Valley and I think the other one was Alvarado hospitals, since the unpaid bills of illegal aliens have bankrupted them.  So again the average citizen will lose a vital service due to abuse by people here illegally.

Currently for the past week firefighters have been fighting the Horse fire, the number 1 priority fire in the country.  It has burned tens of thousands of acres and was started when some illegal aliens failed to extinguish their campfire.  I think the bill for the costs of fighting the fire should be sent to Mexico.

Also this morning before leaving for work I had NBC-7/39 on for the local news, when I saw another example of the biased news reporting.  Ann Curry from the Today show did a report from Lebanon where she made a big deal out of saying the Palestinians are refusing US aid. 

Let's see here, the Palestinians are hiding Hezbollah and Hamas.  Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist groups that likes to blow up civilians at weddings, funerals, when shopping, when eating pizza, or riding the bus.  Both terrorist groups captured Israeli soldiers.  Israel reacted by attacking the terrorists and some of the terrorist human shields are being killed.  In the meantime over 100 Iranian rockets and missiles are being lobbed into civilian towns in Israel.

And now those that shield terrorists are whining and crying that they are being inconvenienced.  I'm sorry but I just don't get it, and I hope that Israel is successful on getting rid of these terrorist groups.  If I were Israel I would bomb both Lebanon and Syria into the Stone Age like the United States did to Bremen and Tokyo in World War II.  If we or anyone for that matter involved in war fail to realize that we have to get them before they get us we will lose.  Those that want to fight a politically correct war are doomed to failure.  When Hezbollah blows up a wedding party do you see their folks out there criticizing their war effort?  No, because they are taking what they do serious.

When World War II first started our troops got the crap kicked out of them.  The enemy who did not follow the rules of conduct that our guys would try and use would kill our medics when they were trying to help them and things like that.  The people we were fighting wanted to win at all costs.  Our Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen learned that their enemy would do what it took to win, and followed no rules.

You cannot regulate war where it is kill or be killed.  We as a country have to get back that aggressiveness that we had back in World War II and fight to win.  We need to start taking reporters that publish our secrets off to jail.  We need to stop trying our young soldiers in the press or making them scapegoats for something possibly made up and reported by the enemy.

The enemy we are fighting today wears no uniform and fights in dirty ways.   In World War II one of the most reported about and dangerous weapons were the Kamikaze Pilots.  That is what we are fighting now, but the Kamikaze's at least were flying a marked plane and wore a uniform.  These suicide bombers can be anything from a child, woman, retarded person, or man.  The one common factor is that they are able to mix with the crowd and are hard to spot. 

 I have no sympathy for people who would shield terrorists and these people in Lebanon, know who the terrorists are, where they are located, and where their weapons are stored.  In other words they are supporting the terrorist's so I see no reason what so ever to have sympathy for them. 

This morning on my way to work I was listening to the Rick Roberts Show and a caller to the show made such a great comment that got me thinking.  I don’t have the exact quote, but pretty much the jest of it was he has lived most of his life in what the countries greatest generation left for him, and he was happy to have lived in the zenith of civilization, and he was disappointed with what we have done to the legacy of what our generation inherited.

I was quite impressed and it has made me think of what the generation of my grandparents left us, and what my generation and my parent’s generation did to flush what they did for us, down the drain.

My grandparents were all immigrants, and they were legal of course.  On my dad’s side, his father hailed from Ireland and his mother was from Germany.  On my mother’s side her father was from Germany and her mother was from France.  They all learned to speak English, got jobs, and worked hard to build a life for themselves.

They survived the depression and in fact all were homeowners.  They were also the generation that won World War II.  At the end of that War the United States was a respected country, and people looked up to us.  What happened to us, and why are we looked down upon now.

I started thinking about that.  Before World War II the United States was kind of an isolationist government though there are some folks in some of the US territories, the Philippines, and Mexico that might disagree with that, as there were still a few things going on from the Spanish/American War and the Mexican/American War.

World War II gained America respect throughout the world.  What have we done with that legacy?  We have flushed it own the drain is what we have done.  And I blame the whole thing on the media, our schools, politicians and Hollywood.

While I was in the Navy for most of my adult life I watched opinions of Americans drop.  I remember my first trip to Townsville, Australia in 1976 and my last trip there in 2000 and saw the difference.  In 1976 people stood in line for hours to tour the ship.  Our dial a sailor program for people to take us out and show us around never had enough sailors to fill all the requests.  In 2000 that attitude had changed as there were few dial a sailor requests and I had many people there voice that they were disappointed in the US as we were immoral, greedy, and trying to dominate the world.

Where did they get that view?  It is from the movies and television shows that come out of Hollywood and also our left wing news media.  Oh and by the way this was when Bill Clinton was still President so it cannot be blamed on President Bush.

The United States started its decline in the 1960’s as television and movies seemed to start stretching the decency boundaries.   You also had all the entitlement programs started by President Johnson and his new society movement.  The colleges and high schools were taken over by people that were busy teaching the liberal agenda, and the students who were busy getting high on marijuana and other drugs.  The news media had a heyday trying to stop the Vietnam War, and as they are now, always reported just the bad things that happened.

Since I was in the Navy through the 70’s up until the millennium I didn’t really keep up much with the news.  I never had the time, as I was married to my job and trying to advance.  I would have a good idea about things that were going on, but I never had the time to analyze it as I have the chance to do now.   I knew about some of the bigger things that happened in the press, and I kept up with a little politics, mainly just to vote for who I thought would do the best job. 

I also spent a lot of time deployed over those years and during deployment you don’t have the access to the news as you do when you are at home.  Actually you do have more access these days as ships now have satellite Internet and satellite television.

On my last deployment I was exposed to FOX News for the first time, and I connected with it more than I had connected with news in the past.  Before I had been watching CNN, NBC with Tom Brokaw, and Nightline. 

When I started watching FOX it was more in line with what I had experienced while I was deployed.  I would watch CNN or NBC’s reporting and wonder where they got their story from, as I didn’t see or experience what they were reporting.

After I retired from the Navy I started channel surfing and comparing news reports.  I started seeing that commentators on the networks were presenting the news in a manner to make the United States look bad.

At the same time I started watching the recording and movie industries, along with TV.  I wonder how everything got so vulgar, and wondered how the FCC let all this happen to the public airwaves.  I started watching the ACLU attacking religion and supporting those that would destroy this country.  I also got to look carefully at the games politicians play to stay in office at all costs, while going against the will of their constituents. 

When I see the protest groups running around criticizing the government and the troops, wanting to open our borders, and now even supporting terrorists it sickens me.  If people are so dissatisfied with the way things are, then leave.  There are plenty of countries that will take you in.  If the United States were to go the route that these people want it to go, there would be no more United States.  We would be just as messed up as some of these other countries that have gone socialist.

Better yet when the terrorists that some of these left wing wacko’s support against Israel start blowing them up in shopping malls, pizza places, and movie theaters, they might then open their eyes to the fact that these people could care less if you support them or not.  They just want to kill the infidels and they don’t care if you are white, black, Hispanic, 80 years old, or 8 years old.

Imagine a world where women can’t drive, can’t divorce, can’t vote.  Imagine a world where if you speak out you will receive their justice.  That will happen if we lose World War III.  It took Pearl Harbor to awaken the nation to the horrors of the Axis Powers.  We have already had our Pearl Harbor for World War III in the World Trade Center bombings.  But it seems there are many people out there that have forgotten about that.  Instead their hatred for anything Bush is causing the enemy to sit up and take notice.  They are seeing the weakness our society as a whole is exhibiting.

In World War II all the people of this country came together and worked toward the war effort.  As a result we are speaking English instead of German or Japanese.  In these times people are worried about their Starbucks coffee, or who is going to win American Idol.  The world outside of our borders is a nasty place, and these terrorists are doing this stuff all over the world.  You just won’t see it on the news unless it makes the Bush Administration look bad.

This Hezbolla group currently at war with Israel has said that thy will activate their cells world wide, and that included the cells they have right here in the United States.  I would say get all of your Starbuck’s coffee now, before there is no more Starbuck’s. 

I guess that is all I have to say today.  I am just rambling now but I’m sure I got my point across.

Tonight I came home to an excellent surprise.  While I was at work today my daughter cleaned and organized all the stuff in the house.

It was a great surprise since I have had no one help me for months, as my son is great at creating messes, but not cleaning him or her up.

I am so grateful for the help.  And she did a great job at it too.  Thank you Judy.

Well this week isn't starting out much better than last week.  Laila and I watched the Miss Universe Pageant last night as I blogged about before.  We had a real good time and when it was over I caught a little of the news and then shut down everything and put all the video stuff away.  I went to bed right after that since Laila was getting ready to go to her weight loss thing.

When I got up this morning I got a shower and all, got my coffee and it took me a little while longer to get the PC up since I had shut it all the way down and secured the power.  I'll talk more about that later.  I then logged on to the Internet and Laila was not on line.  I sent her a Chikka message (text to cell phone) and she sent a text message back to me, telling me they were on their way home.

She came on line about 6:10 AM and we recited the rosary, then she told me all about the gym.  She sounded so excited and though she said she was a little bit sore, she was feeling great.  I am glad that she enjoys it.  Her sister and her daughter are also attending with her, and that is good because they can push each other to stay on the plan.

After we chatted for a while it was time to leave for work.  Again the side gate was closed, so again I had to go to the back gate.  The traffic wasn't too bad and I got to work on time.  After reporting that all my students were present we started right in on the final performance tests, since I had installed the faults on Friday.  Everything went smooth and I even got a visit from one of my old shipmates, who was stationed with me on USS Elliot.  He filled me in on some of our other shipmates and then had to get to class, since he is here to learn about a new system.

Once my class was finished with their performance tests I went to see what was going on and found that they needed someone to help out in the WSC-3 lab.  So I excused my class for the day and went to help in the lab. 

The first thing I found was that one of the Satellite transceivers had an intermittent fault.  I got it down to a card, which I replaced by borrowing from another radio, that we suspected might be non-operational since some of the cards had been removed and were sitting on the workbench.

After getting the first one back together and operational I then put the cards in the second one.  Low and behold, it had the same problem.  So I guess what happened was that the one with the cards removed was being worked on by someone on the night shift.  They were swapping cards with the first one I worked on and had swapped a bad card to that one.  Anyway, since we have no spare card for them I guess we will have one radio down until I can get the card back from the 2M repair shop.  Now I am holding down the fort while the Navy guys are out doing their physical training. 

Friday when I was on my way home from work I was listening to the Roger Hedgecock Show, and he was all upset that the Governator was encouraging people to not use their Air Conditioners and save energy.  He was also saying that a shortage of electricity is the fault of the state government, and the fact that they did not anticipate that it would get warm in the summer.

When Grayout Davis was voted out of office his mismanagement of energy was one of the big reasons he was removed.  Now we are getting threatened with rolling blackouts again.  We are being told to keep our air conditioning turned down and not use appliances until after 7 PM.   I paid to buy my air conditioners, and I pay my electricity bill.  Now the government is trying to tell me how to use something that I am paying for.  Anyway I agree with Roger when he says use everything as normal and when the rolling blackouts start the public outcry will again bring Sacramento back into the public spotlight.  The only time anything seems to happen there is when the press exposes their stupidity and lack of action.

Now I have been keeping stuff off, like my computer when I go to bed, but these people need to get a clue.  We live in the most populated state in the country.  That population grows every year.  Summer comes every year and with it hot temperatures.  When it is hot, the voters like to keep cool.  So each year more electricity is needed and I am sure they could go back and check statistics to make a forecast of how much is needed.

Well that is my rant for today.  I have to get a few things done before the students and the rest of the staff get back.