Kicked major bootie at The Old Goat Ranch this month...
I first had to renew some safety training....Cold Water Survival and Helicopter Escape Training...
I can't believe it's been 4 years since my last go-round, but it has...and as much as I would have rather been working at the Ranch, these are perishable skills...so off to school I went...
The most remarkable part was the fact that the school was being conducted at the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Johnson Space Center...the most incredible pool on earth...
I order to keep the lights on, NASA has rented out the back end of the pool, where the "Dilbert Dunker" (Helicopter Simulator) and life rafts have plenty of room to do their thing...
...and as you wait your turn at the various evolution's, you can peek under the floats separating you from the International Space Station mockups and the astronauts working on various projects...
I was an incredible 3 days...sort of bittersweet that NASA has to let us rabble pee in their pool in order to keep the lights on, but you do what you have to do these days, right? A new POTUS is in the near future....
Precious Bride was able to accompany me to Clear Lake...a few days in a swank hotel was like a mini-vacation...she prowled the streets by day and we enjoyed the pleasures of Clear Lake in the evenings...revisited a few old haunts from my commercial diving days...tho all the spots that used to feature things like mud-wrestling and jello-shots have been converted to tamer, more tourist-friendly fare...
<sigh> Time marches on, eh?
Anyway...here are a few pics to make you landbound folks jealous...taken by my co-conspirator and pro photographer, Terry Moore, the grinning lout in the damp trousers...
Once school was out of the way I hunted up Charles the Carpenter, headed north to the Ranch and got busy.
Where last trip was a study in mud and defeat, this month was one success after the next...
The first photo is notable by what you do NOT see...no more temporary power poles! I got the meter pulled early in the morning by the nice man from the Power Co-op ("Larry" the "Used to be the Cable Guy"), I finished the hookup form the main pole to the sub-panel in a few minutes,then "Larry" hooked the meter back up while I stuck my fingers in my ears and threw the breaker for the the first time...aaaaaaaand.....nothing but the sweet, sweet sound of the jobsite radio playing....
Schweet!
With permanent power now hooked up, we pulled down the temp poles and re-ran all the power cords to the one box I have mounted below the panel...still a tangled mess, but as we start running circuits, it'll sort it self out...
Once the power was hooked back up, Charles the Carpenter and I got busy trimming out the interior sides of the exterior walls, and putting up the interior partitions...it is starting to look very much like the Master Plan, surprisingly...
With Spring solidly in effect, Precious Bride stole Charles for couple of days to do a little farming...they planted dozens more trees as we keep working at restoring some of the foliage lost to the drought...on next months agenda, I have a nice fresh roll of poly tubing ready to go in the ground for drip irrigation to keep these new trees alive....so many projects all needing to be done at the same time is daunting...but with still so much to do, all I can do is be the mouse eating an elephant, and just keep chewing off one little bite at a time...
Anyway, Gentle Readers....Peace Out...
