8 cent basil

Yesterday I was at Central Market oogling all the way cool expensive foodie items, but my favorite thing is the bulk spice section. Where else can you get an entire baggie full of basil for 8 cents? Its the same quantity you buy in the jars at the supermarket aisle for $5. So for less than $5 I bought at least half a dozen spices. The big ticket item... black peppercorns for the grinder at $1.50. Crazy, I know. So really for any cooks out there that don't use this resource, go try it out and save a few bucks from your pocketbook. You can put what you save towards the $6 gallon of milk lately.

BTW- after writing it, I think "8 cent basil" sounds like the name of a band, at least a "Rock Band" band. Dibs on the drums in my new band.

Self Portrait in Flight

While John is busy with slow moving reptiles in FL, I'm busy chugging around the Houston sky trying to avoid fast moving avians in the air! For me the last couple weeks, the bane of my existance was the weather which kept interfereing with my flights and scrubbing me out a dozen times or so.

But between yesterday and today I managed to finish all of my required solo hours!! So what that means is I have officially completed all the requirements towards my pilot's license. The only thing left is a review flight or two with my instructor and then I will be ready to take the FAA flight exam. I am getting pretty excited to get this done and I can't wait for the test (hmmm... rarely do I say that) to make me an official pilot.

At the end of my flight this afternoon, I grabbed my camera and took this self portrait while flying to prove that I really have been up there and to mark the end of my "training".

The Bane of My Existence

After coming down to FL March 1st, I thought it would be great to go home for a few days, see Nujoud, relax, and then jump right back into the project. Well, little did I know, our project got shut down by Florida's DEP because of Gopher Tortoises. They are a protected species and have been causing us headaches due to the stringent regulations surrounding us wanting to relocate them (permanently in the bottom of Lake Okeechobee).

Elaborating on what I mentioned in my previoius post....We thought we had permission to commence work January 1st. Then some tree-hugger hippie group got involved and so we then thought we could start around March 15th...nope. We finally start April 7th and get shut-down April 17th. The tree-huggers are trying anything and everything to get this project to go away. They "happened" to find another gopher tortoise burrow along a section of our project corridor that hadn't shown up on any previous surveys. It turns out that these tortoises are protected in the southeastern United States. This is driving me nuts because, as environmental inspectors, my group has to directly deal with FDEP. We spent 6 hours today ferrying FDEP up and down every inch of our 34 mile project today looking for these bastards. Go Away!!! It only makes matters worse that Gopher Tortoise mating season is April-May, Nice!!!

Other than that things in Florida are going well. I get to work with a bunch of cool people who only care about working hard and getting things done. Haven't worked with many of these folks in the past, I thought they were extinct. The hours are long but most days seem to fly by, which is nice. The good news is that today Paul and I realized that Fridays still feel like Fridays. The bad news is we work Saturdays. The weather is starting to warm up, high 80s mainly. There was an older gentleman who had to be taken to the ER for dehydration a couple of weeks ago. As of yesterday he's still in the hospital. He had kidney failure and a host of other problems. No one believes dehydration to be the root cause of his ailment as drug use is suspected.

I can't believe that it has already been 2 months (next Thursday) since I packed up and headed to Florida. Time really does fly. There's no time to do anything here besides eat, sleep, and work. Most nights I only get about 3 hours to myself before having to get some sleep, get up, and do it all over again. Kinda like Groundhog Day. It really reminds me of my Navy days at sea, although now I get compensated much better for the long hours I put in.

If the stars align properly, I should be home again around Memorial Day weekend. But that is dependent upon project progress. If we get too far behind, we'll start working Sundays as well....and that will genuinely suck.

Tomorrow is the NFL Draft, and I know Toby probably won't get a wink of sleep in anticipation. There is a rumor floating around that Shockey might get traded to New Orleans. As a Giants fan I hope this trade gets done because Shockey is over-rated and Boss played exceptionally well last season for the Giants. We'll find out in about 15 hours I guess.

Gangly Birds in the Sky

A benefit of working in the Tower II building is having a window cube overlooking Ellington Field. There are quite a few aviation fans on the floor and yesterday afternoon someone pointed out these new birds coming in for a landing. This is the first time I've seen a Osprey in real life but two of them came in to refuel. Here's a zoom in from the picture I snapped while the first was cruising along the runway, sorry for the distance but its a big airfield. Gotta say they looked pretty cool though.

Speaking for Coin

Sunday I gave a talk at a fundraising brunch for the South Puget Sound Comm College. Because I am a "rocket scientist" from Tumwater people think that is worth hearing about. So whatever, the talk went good and the brunch raised over $20k for equipment in a new math and science bldg. So there's my small part to helping out a school. They took a bunch of pictures and if they ever post them on the web, I'll have to add some here. But for now, you'll have to take my word on this.

I also got to see my friend Breyan (Hi Bre!) that I've known since 1st grade there. Always cool to see her and maybe I can convince her sometime to come down and visit beautiful, scenic H-town!

Blow Glass Man, Blow

Today we went to the Glass Museum in Tacoma. Glass blowing is a big thing up here, so much so that we have a whole museum devoted just to the art mostly showcasing Dale Chihuly works. He's the big egotistical end all be all of NW glass art but whatever. The feature exhibit right now is all work from an Italian artist named Lino Tagliapietra. Way cool stuff. My personal favorite was the orange Natoalos (nautilus) piece. No pictures in the museum, of course, but check out the link to see his work. But here is a picture from the live studio in the museum where you can take pics. The group is working on a piece that will be featured in the pool just outside the museum entrance when complete.

Global Warming What??!?!?!

I am up in Olympia (WA) this weekend for an event and this is what is looked like this morning when I got up. I would like to point out that it is April 19th, I repeat APRIL 19th. It used to be we only got a couple days like this a year in Jan/Feb timeframe. But apparently this has been happening a lot this winter here.


And this is what it looked like trying to drive over to my brother's house this morning.


But as with all western WA snow, this is what it looked like by the afternoon.

Tour 18

So for John's graduation, my siblings all got together and gave him a gift certificate to the Tour 18 golf course. It's not exactly close to our house so we hadn't yet used the certificate but him being home this week was a perfect opportunity. He didn't have to work Monday and I took a mental health day and we went up to play. All of the holes on the course are near-replica's (can't be exact or there would be copyright infringement) of famous holes around the country. So my big accomplishment and the only hole I par'd was the Sawgrass 17 hole. I feel good about that because the hole is an island and I managed to stay dry and par. Here is a picture of John tee'ing off on a great looking hole. He ended up in the azaleas but all the same it was a beautiful day and a fun round of golf.

Weekend of John Cont.

Sunday we had a nice brunch at Villa Capri with the Halligan's and then hit up the driving range. We were borrowing the Halligan golf clubs in advance of our big Monday fun (see next post). Jen- Extend the elbows!!

John 3-0 BBQ

So I'm a little late getting this posted but, heck, John is home this week so this is the lower priority. Friday night we had a BBQ with some friends since John was home and we never really got to celebrate his 30th birthday whil he was in FL. So here are some pics from that event.