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As I’ve been exploring the Potomac River by water, I’ve discovered some interesting spots and learned some interesting history. One spot that is rapidly becoming my favorite is Mallows Bay, on the Maryland side of the river, which is the location of the largest ship graveyard in the Western Hemisphere.
Regular readers of this humble website might have noticed that over the past few weeks we’ve gone through several changes in our look. Astute regular readers might have also noticed that on frequent occasions the look of this website was “Basic HTML,” a look where the actual layout was sucky basic lists of posts and navigation with no apparent effort made in layout.
There are reasons for all this.
I was in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week attending a Navy reunion with the crew of USS Scamp (SSN 588), the first submarine I served on during my Navy career. In addition to sitting around with old shipmates drinking, sharing sea stories, and generally catching up on 35 years of living, I chartered a kayak trip down the Colorado River. And what a trip that was!
Winnie finally returned from China on Saturday evening, just in time for me to leave for Las Vegas on Sunday evening. It seems we can’t seem to get our schedules aligned.
Winnie left this afternoon for a rather short-notice trip back to China. She’ll be returning April Friday April 10, just shy of three weeks visiting half-way around the world from here.
The month of March is said to “roar in like a lion and go out like a lamb.” It’s a bit too early to know how March will be going out, but it certainly roared in loudly enough.
We’re approaching the last day of February with outside temperatures still below freezing. We had another dusting of snow yesterday, the third snow shower this month. Not enough to shut down Washington, but enough to scare drivers off the road during commuting hours. For those of us brave enough, we had a pleasant drive during peak commuting hours which is a newsworthy event indeed for this area.
Today is the New Year’s celebration for about one-quarter of the world’s population, as celebrated by Chinese and other Asian cultures. It’s the most important celebration in the Chinese calendar.
Winnie and I were targeted for a rather slick scam recently but managed to avoid losing money. It was an interesting scam that started with a spam e-mail inviting me to do some “Secret Shopper” work.
A Lifetime Of War
Last week the Washington Post ran a blog post titled “Washington Post Story: Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war.” The author Philip Bump used a chart to show the percentages of a lifetime an American has spent at war, based on their ages.
This got me thinking about just how many American wars I’ve experienced during my lifetime.
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