The weekday is here again and with it the time change which made me think I was running late this morning.  I remembered to set the clocks back but my body clock woke me up at the same time I usually get up.  After glancing at the clock though I realized I had another hour to sleep so I stayed in bed for a bit.

I was pretty busy gaming over the weekend.  Yeah I still got the laundry done and all, but this new game Tribal Wars has me addicted big time.  I have only been playing for a week but I have already passed Laila and I took over my first village yesterday.  The only problem with taking over a village is that you have to waste a ton of resources getting it going at the start.  The queue only allows you to schedule 3 village upgrades at a time and so went I went to bed last night I tried to pick the three longest things to build.  That gave me about two hours of building.  The queue allows you to schedule more stuff but at a higher amount for materials so I went ahead and scheduled additional building to last through the night.  Then this morning I had to do it again for while I am at work.

I should have just had Laila account sit but she had to go to the dentist with Denis so she wouldn't have been home anyway.

So now I have everything scheduled to build in both worlds and on all villages.  I am growing fast and I think I can really move up in this game once I get a better handle on things.

I got so addicted to it that I forgot to post the blog entries that I wrote Friday so those will get posted today as well as this one.  I did get the bills paid though and got my laundry and some grocery shopping in.

It was funny as Judy was watching my every move as I took over my first village.  She is really into the game too and glad to see me moving up.  She has been playing for a little over a month and was really excited to see me growing so fast.  I also owe a lot to our tribe leader, Payne who has been helping me out with resources to get started.  I can hardly wait to start helping out others in the tribe who are just starting out. 

I want to get a really good handle and good production in the area I am now and then start expanding from there.  Laila and I are located fairly close as far as the map goes, but not as close as I would like.  I want to get my area established and then start moving towards her on the map.  That will mean taking about 4 or 5 more villages in my area before moving her direction.  I am really getting this down I think.  Anyway we will see how much resources I have when I get home today and how fast my new village has grown.

I have still been keeping up in Unification Wars and it seems like the entire fed has accounts in Tribal Wars now.  What is cool with tribal wars is that unless you have a young village you can go ahead and schedule the next few hours of work and then go do something else for a while, like level up in Unification Wars or go to the store and stuff like that.

While doing all of that I did manage to take in the Chargers/Vikings game.  Again San Diego just didn't look the way they are expected to play.  Yeah they were leading at the half mainly out of another fantastic play from Warren Cromarty where he took the missed field goal back for an NFL record of 109 yards.  This morning the talk of the channel 39 news department was how he snubbed his team mate to do his celebratory dance in the end zone.  I didn't notice it myself, but then I don't like the dances anyway. 

What would be cool is that if they got caught dancing in the end zone they lose the extra point attempt or something like that.  If I jumped around like a fool every time I fixed a transceiver I would get penalized some how, like probably get fired.  A football player's job is to score points so cut out the fancy jumping around like an idiot and play the game.  After this last game I think the Chargers are headed for mediocrity this year.  There is no way they will get past the Colts this weekend.

I was kind of fascinated watching the Patriots/Colts game this weekend.  New England is in a class by itself and I think they will have an undefeated season this year.  They are by far the best team in football, possibly in the history of the game.  What surprised me was how many former Chargers are on the New England team.

Well enough on that, I just go done resetting all the clocks and checking out the radios for my class.  My friend on the night shift was having troubles with one of them Friday and even called me on the phone and I tried to help him out over the phone.  Anyway I told him I would look at it today and it turned out to be a switch on the breakout box, something easily overlooked by the staff.  I know to check it right away because I have seen it many times, but he is still relatively new so he missed it.  No big thing and it is fixed now.

Right now I am watching another of my buddies try and get out of a jam.  He took Friday off to move and this morning when he came in he found out they had scheduled him for the quarterdeck watch.  The only problem is that he does not have the right uniform here and he is trying to get someone else to take it.  That is one thing that always bugged me when I was in.  And that is having a watch bill coordinator that waited until the last minute to get the watch bill out.  When I was a coordinator I used to get them out well in advance to make sure everyone had a good heads up as to what watches they would be standing.  I hope he gets it worked out.

It is now time to sit down and rest for a bit after a really busy end of the morning and afternoon.  After my class left for the day which was pretty early I decided to repair a radio that had an RF connector pushed out through the bottom.  This is not the first time that has happened to this particular transceiver and so after talking it over with ET1 Kelly we decided to super glue it in place.  To get to the connector I had to pretty much gut the bottom of the transceiver and it is a real pain in the rear end to keep everything from falling out and to keep track of all the screws and all. 

I had to actually tie some of the sub assemblies up with hook up wire to keep them from hanging by their wires and cables.  It took about an hour to get everything removed and then I put glue on the connector and put it back in.  After getting it in I decided to look at the connector and see why it kept getting pushed out and discovered that the connector was all chewed up and out of shape.  So that was the reason it kept getting pushed out.

So I showed it to Kelly and we went ahead and took one of our old chassis and took the RF connector and socket out of there.  It was the rigid coaxial cable running from the A6 translator module to the A1 transmitter module.  We then installed it in our transceiver and then started the task of putting everything together.

One thing about our radios and that is that they are twice as hard to put back together as they are to take apart.  With both of us working on it and also since we had removed the chassis from the case we managed to get it put back together pretty quickly and then all we had to do was put the ribbon cable back on, which is always a head ache.

We finally got that on, which is the hardest part, and then did a quick operational check and found it to be working fine.  We then decided since we had the other chassis out we should see if there was a way to take it apart to get to the A13 module since we had some time and that has been an ongoing problem with another transceiver.  We looked and looked but every thing we attempted on the stripped radio was going to involve some really difficult procedures.  It was cool to experiment on a spare parts chassis, but to do that with a live working transceiver would not be good.  We can still use it for other things other than sending data like AM or FM so we decided rather than do more damage we would try and pull the connector back up through the top. 

I ran over to OTCIXS where be have a better tool box of small tools for that type of work and when I returned Kelly told me I was going to be pissed.  The two of us have been trying to find a way to fix this problem for months now.  Every time there is not class doing labs or PT's we have worked on this problem when we had free time.  And we had overlooked something so simple it is embarrassing.  The WSC-3 has a preset channel module the A-20 that slides in from the front of the unit.  When it is removed the cover and screw that hold it in place are right there for easy access when you remove the TR switch A-21 from the bottom.

It is one of those things that we just kept overlooking.  Anyway we went ahead and supper glued the connector back in place and everything is working with that one though we were both a bit embarrassed.  And so now we learned another new thing about the radios in the process.

I am a little depressed as ET1 Kelly will be transferring back to the fleet in a few months.  He and I have been the main troubleshooting guru's around her and we get along well in the process, so I will miss him when he leaves. 

Well I guess that is about it for today.  Have a great week everyone.

Friday is finally here and I have to say I am really looking forward to the weekend.  After the big problems trying to get to work yesterday this morning was pretty uneventful until I got to the gate.  There was the usual mess of everyone trying to get into line and the usual folks taking the freeway south instead of going in the gate.  The line I got into was running extremely slow and when I got to the gate the guy there was more interested in my retired ID than my contractors ID.  So I guess they may have stepped up security a bit as the other lane was running slow too.

Anyway I got here early and already got my faults loaded up for the day.  Now I am just waiting for the class to get here and I can get them started.

Today on the radio Rick Roberts started a new thing.  I guess 11 of the 17 burn victims from the fires were illegal aliens.  They of course are being taken care of at taxpayer's expense.  I think they should be stabilized and sent back to Mexico for treatment but of course that won't happen. 

Anyway, we have another Santa Ana coming in this weekend and to prevent fires from the illegal encampments he is having callers give the location of the migrant camps to his staff and they are making a map of the encampments so that city and county officials can go round them up and send them away since the Mayor has flatly denied that San Diego is a sanctuary city. 

So I guess we'll see what becomes of that, but seriously these camps are a danger.  I have no facts or figures but I am sure with the amount of brush fires we have here and all, many can be trace to the illegal encampments.  That is why more and more people are waking up to the fact that illegals are a problem.  I have known it for a long time, but now that it has hit the community hard and many people have lost homes they have awakened to the fact that there is a problem.  Especially when they were staying in the evacuation centers.  What illegal could pass up free food and a free place to stay?   Not many from what I have heard.

In preparation of the Santa Ana's coming this weekend and due to the fact that three of the fires are still burning the Goverator has the state fire folks on alert so hopefully there will not be a repeat of last week.

What is really strange about everything is that I actually turned on the heat in the house last night because we were all feeling a bit cold and now today it is supposed to get really hot.  Oh well, I guess that is life.  I guess I had better get this saved and ready to post since the class is starting to show up and we got to get today's fun started.

This morning was the first time in a long time I was actually late for work.  I got up early and left the house on time.  I even had my son with me so I could drop him off near the base so he could go to work. 

I took my left turn onto Main Street to head to the gate and was wondering why the traffic was so heavy.  Then I saw the problem, a traffic accident blocking the southbound lane of Main Street.  The police had the road blocked off and were having everyone turn around and head for the main gate.

It caused a massive backup on the northbound side of Main Street as well as the westbound lanes of 32^nd Street onto the base.  So instead of getting to work early as I usually do I was 10 minutes late.  But then so were many others so it was not a big thing.

Regular readers of my blog might remember all the times I have told of the horrors of Main Street on the way to the base.  A lot of people will pass the gate going north and then make an illegal u-turn to go south and get in the gate faster.  Some drive down the median to get past the line of cars making the right hand turn onto the base. 

This morning it looked like someone was making an illegal u-turn and got hit by someone going south in the median from the locations of the cars.  I am sure at least one of the drivers if not both will be cited in the crash.

BT

Well I am another year older today though I don’t feel like much has changed.  I got up a little early today, but it was a little chilly so I stayed in the shower a little longer.  I went ahead and logged on to get game stuff done and talk with Laila.

After that it was on the road headed for work.  The way in was a little more congested than usual but the gate was not bad.  I got in and got my lab all loaded up with faults and ready to go. 

Hopefully the day will go fast as I have some stuff I want to do on Excel.  Anyway I guess I will have to finish this over the lunch hour as it is almost time to get started for the day.

The morning went well so I am back during the lunch hour to add some more to the post for today.  The only problem is that I don’t really have much to say today.  I have been getting caught up on the news but it is the same old thing.  The politicians are playing politics and getting nothing done.  Then we have the murders and craziness that is always going on some place.

I did like seeing new episodes of “NCIS” and “House” but was annoyed when NBC showed a rerun of “Law and Order SVU”.  I guess they are making enough money off of “Deal or No Deal” so they don’t need the viewers in that time slot.

Tonight will be fun as I will be getting interrupted by the door bell all night.  I will just have Carlos and Judy take acre of it I guess.  I bought 4 big bags of candy yesterday and can’t wait until the night is over so I can eat the leftovers, well not all of them.

Oops I forgot that today is the last day of the month so it is paperwork day.  Guess I had better get this saved and get that done so hopefully I can get out of here a few minutes early.

We had a little excitement in the neighborhood last night resulting in a police involved shooting.  Up on Reo Drive across from the post office there is a grocery shop, a pizza place and a few other small businesses, like a taco shop, bakery, liquor store, the barber shop where I get my hair cut, and a few other small businesses.

Well last night Judy went to pick up her car and was going to stop for some Mexican food on the way home.  Right after she left she called on her cell phone to say that someone had been shot in front of the taco shop.

Later when I watched the news they said that the police had been called to investigate a disturbance in the area.  When they got there they found a couple of women in a stolen car and some guy that had run into the liquor store.  They arrested the driver of the stolen car and put her in the police car and then wile trying to get the guy out of the liquor store somehow he got shot and ran off.  While the police were going after him someone let the arrested lady out of the police car and she got away and is still on the loose. 

The man in the meantime broke into someone’s house a few blocks down on Rancho Hills.  He was arrested there.  Seems to me some police officers have egg on their faces with the escape of the woman.  Also I can’t say that I am surprised at having a police action in that area.

The opened the recycling center next to the post office that I blogged about a couple of months ago.  Since then all the riff raff have come back to the area.  There are panhandlers hanging out in front of the grocery store and the liquor store all the time.  At least they are not hanging around in front of the post office like they did last time there was a recycling center in the area. 

Hopefully the police will take notice and start running these folks off.  As a result I do most of my shopping at Ralph’s as they have a security guard or the exchange/commissary where only military families can shop.  They may be a little out of the way but I don’t like being has bothered by the panhandlers.   

Laila and I have been progressing in Tribal Wars as well as keeping up in both Neopets and Unification Wars.  Last night before I went to bed I put enough stuff in the build queue to build for a few hours and I woke up for some reason at 3:30 AM so I went downstairs and figured I would put some more stuff in the cue before going back to bed.  I got a server busy error and was not able to get onto my account so I was a little bummed out about that.  This morning when I got up I was able to post outpost in UC and collect my Neopet freebies, but was still not able to get onto the Tribal Wars site. 

That bothers me since in that game building yourself up fast and protecting your village is important.  I hope this is not a common occurrence in that game or I could be destroyed during the workday or when traveling.  That would get me very angry.

Well after all the kudos and all that San Diego got after the fires, now the complainers are on the news.  Some didn’t get notified fast enough, and others didn’t get called.  If I remember correctly you had to register for the reverse 911 thing.  At least I remember having to do something to get us on the list.  But then again we live in the 21^st century and so if they don’t break into “Survivor” with a special report telling you to register most people will not know about it. 

Sometimes the sheer stupidity of people amazes me though it probably shouldn’t.  With all the news you can find on cable or satellite, and with all the news you can get over the internet I find it amusing to talk to some of the uninformed people you run across.

Oh and then there are the ones that are only informed by CNN, CBS, ABC or NBC that always of course quote the same stuff in the same way.  Oh well, I guess someday people may wake up.

Oh and this morning while listening to the radio on the way to work people that had lost their homes or who were evacuated were calling in telling of their experiences.  There seemed to be a common thread.  The evacuation and aid places were all overrun by illegal aliens with their hands out. In fact one lady said she felt like a minority as 90 percent of the people there were Mexican and all the aid workers were speaking Spanish.  Makes you wonder about the state of things when illegal aliens actually get better treatment than citizens.  I wonder how much of this is true and how much exposure it will get if it is.

This morning I had to remove the faults from the radios left by the night shift and install my faults.  Then when my class is done I have to pull my faults out and put theirs back in.  What a pain having two shifts going at the same time.  Well at least it makes the time go faster.

Well I guess that is it for today.  I had a busy morning and will have an equally busy afternoon.  I have to stop by the store on the way home and get goodies for tomorrow night.  I might also just get something already made for dinner because I already know I will be tired. 

Sorry about not blogging for a few days.  With the wild fires going I found myself extremely tired all the time and so after getting up and calling into work I would just go back to bed for a while.  Over the weekend I just stayed in bed.  I guess it might have been oxygen to the blood stream of something, but I was really barely moving along.

This morning even, it was hard to get up for work.  I woke up when the clock went off but I just couldn’t get out of bed.  Then when I did it was like I was in slow motion.  I am better now that I got to work, but I really don’t like feeling this run down.

Over the weekend Laila and I found a new addiction in a game called Tribal Wars.  It can be played slowly since everything takes time in the game so if you need to log off or do something you just have it do some of the longer term things and then check back later.  It is the perfect game to play while playing UC,

In UC I made a newbie mistake yesterday and built on my main first thing in the morning before having my coffee.  So today right after I get home I have to reset.  At least I’ll be able to go to bed early that way.

Wow, I just remembered, by waking up late this morning I didn’t use my turns so I will have wasted a bunch of them by the time I get home tonight.  Oh well, it’s only a game.

It is strange to be back at work again after the fires and all.  I was a little hard to get back into the swing of things, but I managed to get back in the groove pretty quickly.  The students didn’t get back into it as fast as I did though.  With all the time off right in the middle of the troubleshooting labs, it took them a while to get started.  It started picking up about halfway through the morning.

I will have to adjust the schedule a bit now that we are back to make up for the lost time.  Tomorrow they will take the receive test.  I didn’t want to give it to them today because I wanted to give them a chance to get back into the swing of things and also look over their notes before I spring the test on them.  Normally after the test we would have them just go home, but since we lost all those days I will have them start the final troubleshooting practice after the test tomorrow.

Other than that things are ok.  I was happy to see the Chargers playing back up to expectations with their big win over Houston.   The World Series is over, so congratulations to the city of Boston and the Red Sox.  Now I will be able to watch House again on Fox, now that the World Series is over.

Ouch, I just remembered something else I forgot to do.  I belong to Columbia House and when you get those cards or e-mails that tell you to send or answer within a certain amount of time to keep from receiving the director’s choice, and when you don’t you receive the stuff automatically.  I think I just messed up and forgot to say I didn’t want it this month.  That means I will have to send it back.  What a pain.  I don’t mind buying stuff from them, but would rather have it on my own time and when I am ready.

I do want to get some stuff to take on my next trip and was planning on ordering some stuff.  Now I will receive these that I didn’t really want to get.  Oh well, it will just be a small inconvenience.

Anyway I guess that is about it for today.  I hope everyone has a great week.

Six illegal immigrants arrested at Qualcomm

Two Arrested For Arson In Vista