Vacation Time & Other Thoughts

In the 911 dispatch field we work some strange shifts. Today, a Saturday is my Friday for the week. Tomorrow I start a short vacation; the first one in years that isn’t related to my bird hobby. Don’t have a lot planned, but after the last few weeks at work and all the weather related business we had, I felt that I needed some time off.

I am going to try to catch up with some reading. Then I want to watch the Star Wars and Star Trek movies one more time. I just finished reading W.E.B. Griffin’s Black Ops, the fifth of his Presidential Agent series of books. I was a little disappointed with the start of the book. Most of Griffin’s books are a bit “tighter” all the way through. This one started out slowly and, to me, disjointed. The last few years Griffin’s son has been co-writing some of his books and with Black Ops it seemed that the son may have written the first few chapters and then the father took over and finished. W.E.B. Griffin is a pseudonym for William E. Butterworth. Under that name he has also written many books, including numerous juvenile fiction books.

The weather has really been a huge factor in our lives here in Washington State the past several weeks. Leading up to Christmas we got a lot of snow which lead to some real problems for people getting around the area. Eastern Washington, specially the area around Spokane is still having snow related problems. Then, just in the past several days those of us in Western Washington got hit by a lot of rain, which fell in a short amount of time. We really had some road problems, and made the national news. If you were in the Puget Sound area (near Seattle), the only way to get out of the area was to fly. A 20-mile stretch of I5 was closed south of Seattle, and all three of the roads across the Cascade Mountains were closed due to avalanche concerns. Each day the Interstate and passes were closed cost the economy about $16,000,000 according to news reports I saw.

That just about does it for today. I hadn’t written anything for awhile and thought I should catch up a bit. I’ll try to do better during my vacation.

All the Best.