Nah, winter hasn't arrived just yet.
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Get off my LAWN! "Grumpy Old Farts"
- Thread starter B-string
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OK, Country Club.(I abbreviate on my calendar[paper thing on wall]as Martin Downs Country Club)
Neither young nor hot* and more Irish/Scot. Haven't seen a Ducati in many years.
*except on the outdoor gig
Whew! A whirlwind trip back to the old hometown of Mrs. Dog & I today, visiting as many friends and family as we could before coming back to home, sweet retirement home. Good visits, but good to be back home!
Got my regular church gig tomorrow morning playing Contemporary Christian in the first service and old-time hymns in the second service. The best of both worlds, always uplifting!
Next weekend we just gotta go get some more baby snuggles from the new 4-month-old living a few hours away!! After all, it's almost a whole month since the last snuggles, and he's ballooning up into his 9-12 months clothes already! He's displaced the recent 4-year-old birthday boy as the baby of the family, who is rapidly replacing his soon-to-be 7-year-old sister as the most precocious of the family. Ah, but there's the absolutely darling 12-year-old granddaughter, who her mother says is already showing surly signs of teenagerdom, though we haven't seen it yet. Then there's the three teenage boys, high school soph, junior and senior, who all believe they already know everything worth knowing! They don't even listen to their 25-year-old college grad cousin who is just now really learning her way in the real world. Usually only get to see one, or two at a time, here or there. But Christmas sometimes four to six, sometimes! Keeps us young . . . -ish!
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Well seasoned, at any rate!
Mostly salty, we thinks...
- Oct 22, 2015
- 21,166
- 256,896
- Disclosures
- I am an affiliate for Ari Cap.
All this sailor talk and me with no spinach.
- Oct 22, 2015
- 21,166
- 256,896
- Disclosures
- I am an affiliate for Ari Cap.
And no doubt blissfully unaware my title upon my retirement was "consultant". It's a long road from green reporter to newspaper consultant, and not one I'd travel again. Now it just so happens that I was very recently asked in a serious setting just what a newspaper consultant is and all I think needs be said is the paper always went to press on my watch. What is in the paper is another matter (bird cage liner, it's held by some).
Ahem...the Law of the Sea requires me to take umbrage, if I knew what umbrage was. I was a MARINE, madam...the sailors are the ones with the cute scarves and silly pants.
And indeed we use a lot of it for lining cages, which is about what the local comic is good for. I had an editor tell me in all seriousness that copy editors are obsolete.
I'm ex-Coast Guard but made sure that I got stationed on good old terra firma. The Navy squids called us "shallow-water sailors". 
- Oct 22, 2015
- 21,166
- 256,896
- Disclosures
- I am an affiliate for Ari Cap.
Sailors eat better than marines, I'm told.
Old boss o' mine was a four tours special forces colonel in Vietnam. Very firm about never stepping in a boat or helicopter again. Which locked his wife out of vacations on Catalina.
Old boss o' mine was a four tours special forces colonel in Vietnam. Very firm about never stepping in a boat or helicopter again. Which locked his wife out of vacations on Catalina.
I thought the Coast Guard mission looked great...but that unofficial second motto scared the dog out of me.I'm ex-Coast Guard but made sure that I got stationed on good old terra firma. The Navy squids called us "shallow-water sailors".
I know the official motto was semper paratus (always ready), but I don't know the unofficial second motto that you refer to...
The reason I joined was that they have a peace-time mission instead of always playing war games. I also wanted a wider training and experience in electronic repair vs. being trained on one specific piece of gear as in larger military services.
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In my case, when a company has a technical problem, they might ask me to take a look and see if I can recommend a better approach, or undertake to solve the problem. It's relatively small scale.
When a company or government entity has a major project, they will contract a large consulting company to supply workers to implement it. They keep the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. This is big money. It can be frustrating dealing with these workers. Lying. Missed deadlines. Submitting poor quality work that does not meet the specs when tested. Using every trick in the book to get away with whatever they can. People being assigned to a group, spending months in training, then going on sick leave or being unable to perform the job in the end. More delays.
I won't go into detail. As an example, one project that I'm aware of had a total budget of $75 million. With cost overruns and missed deadlines, that has climbed to $1.1 billion. It was a mess when it went live causing serious damage to databases. Another major project with thousands of workers was needed just to fix that problem, another budget. Those in charge now want to scrap the entire system, start over, and replace it with another one. It's taxpayer money.
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Anymore, it seems that government functions to make it more difficult to conduct business and waste money. It has probably been functioning like this longer than I have been around...
Wonder what the cost overrun was on the pyramids?
The scale is getting larger and larger. The Apollo mission costed $28 billion to put men on the moon in the 60's. Imagine what a similar project would cost today.
I was so tuned-in to the space program when I was a young lad. I was unaware of the total cost of the Apollo program. I couldn't even guess at what it would cost these days!
Slave labor helped them keep costs down.
Betcha the contractors were raking off though.
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