Blog

It's that time of year again! No, I mean besides the election. The season for canned food drives and clothes donations. The church I attend is partnered with "Samaritan’s Purse". They distribute shoe boxes which you fill up by running down the aisle of a Dollar store and stuffing it with toys, hygiene items, and things for school. Drop it off at the church and they send it to a child in one of the countries in Africa they support. Before you drop it off, you scan the barcode so you can track...

Back in the day, when we were on station off a certain coast, we used to joke about the day when our countries would have normal relations and we could take liberty in the ports we were surveilling.

Time changes everything, and I find myself finishing a trip with my wife in one of these countries--four of them, actually--Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. I picked up this beauty in a junk shop on the main square in Tallinn. It is a Soviet submariner's pin, the equivalent of our...

This past few days I flew relief supplies to Shenandoah airport and Hickory, NC to support the relief efforts for Hurricane Helene. A tractor-trailer was loading up at Shenandoah to head south and they had posted a detailed list of what they needed. I went to the Walmart and loaded up--it was fun, like a scavenger hunt, looking for things I never buy. I saw parts of the Walmart I had never been to before.

The next day I saw a FB post looking for pilots to ferry supplies down to Hickory, a...