Good climb today. I use climb I did 137 floors in 30 minutes. I didn't really feel like going but I have to get into the gym. I had goals when I came out here. finish my arabic tapes, not happening yet. Increase my score in the PRT, do able if I can stay off the cigars.

Fathom
Fathom was originally a land measuring term derived from the Anglo-Saxon word "fætm" meaning literally the embracing arms, or to embrace. In those days, most measurements were based on average sizes of parts of the body, such as the hand or foot, or were derived from average length between two points on the body. A fathom is the average distance from middle-fingertip to middle-fingertip of the outstretched arms of a six-foot tall man. Even today in our modern Navy, Sailors can be seen "guesstimating" the length of line by using the Anglo-Saxon fingertip method; crude but still reliable.

I was out on the flight deck and remember a little fun we had with the Desert Duck the other day. It seems that while the Duck was making one of her deliveries she tagged our flight deck. When I say tagged I mean got out of the helo after chocks and chains were removed and, in the of all, including the CO in the pilot house, stamped big yellow duck feet on the flight deck. Well to say the least that kind of annoyed alot of folks. So this time out our DET put together some stamps and glued them to the palms of their gloves. The plan was that Denis and Sinur, my riggers, were to chock and chain the bird. Then just before departure two of the det would replace them. I thought that the riggers going into the helo hanger and emerging as two completely different people might be a little suspicious. I mean the only thing in common with the two sets was Hamilton and Denis, both of which are black. However Hamilton is 6' at least, and Denis is shorter than me. As it turns out they the air crew wasn't even paying attention. Our grape, fueler brought out bottle of apple juice in a sample bottle. After he took the real sample bottle with real JP5 he placed it in his bucket and removed the bottle of apple juice and swirled it. Now apple juice looks nothing like JP5. JP5 looks more like Budwieser, apple juice looks more like Ship Fuel ( DFM ). Also when one swirls apple juice a lot of bubbles are produced because of the surface tension of the water. The air crewman just looked at the apple juice and gave the pilots a thumbs up. The Grapes just shrugged pulled the top off and took a swig. We didn't really expect the duck to believe that the apple juice was JP5. In fact he should have commented on how dirty our fuel was. So since they were so unattentitive as to allow a bottle full of apple juice to pass inspection I guess they wouldn't notice a 5' black guy growing an extra foot.
Well the time came for the chains to be removed and out went Hamilton and his partner to remove chains. after they broke the chains and were waiting for the signal to remove chocks they took off the gloves they were wearing and put on the ones with stamps. Then they stamped the heck out of helo, Ham' didn't care if he were seen or not he just put paw prints everywhere. His buddy tried to avoid detection. So off she went with paw prints of one side and hawk track on the other.
I knew of it though I kept telling people I didn't want to know, citing plausible deniability. What I didn't appreciate was the manner in which the duck had hit us. It wasn't in a sneaky fashion. They waited till Chocks and Chains were removed. Then kicked open the door and just put big stamps all over our flight deck. If I had been of the flight deck I would have been hard pressed not to wet the guy down with a fire hose.
Well that it for now but I'll be writing later.