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Post by Deleted on Apr 3, 2012 6:25:34 GMT 9
dont know how much of an accomplishment this is, nor would I dare compare it to some of the good stuff people have written here, but I've been fortunate, I guess, to have had one CAREER, so to speak in all my years since I left my 4 years in the Air Force.
I wound up being chosen for sales and marketing positions for a couple of companies. Started in 1967, just a few months after I got out of the service, and wound up being in sales and marketing until 2011. That's not the notable part, what's interesting is that during that time I've managed to accumulate over a million miles in ground transportation, mostly cars, and well over a million and a half miles in air transportation by commercial airlines. That part was basically over a ten year period where I spent at least one night in every state except Alaska, Iowa, Montana and Wyoming, almost a dozen countries, and had one notable trip that had me traveling 24,000 miles (that's basically around the world) in less than 4 days. That trip took me from NJ to CA, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, CA and NJ. I spent one night in Hong Kong, another in Singapore, and flew the rest of the time.
I flew so much I have a permanent BOEING imprint on my left cheek from spending all that time in a seat. I guess I should have counted the number of flights, but I'd have to say I averaged at least 4 a week for at least 6 of those years, that would be about 1250 flights, not counting the other weeks when I would still fly 2 or 3 a week.
Dont know how impressive it was, but those landings got to be awfully painful after a while. Guess that's what pushed my need for a spinal fusion.
But I guess the more important thing was that I was lucky enough to have a wife who was strong enough to raise our two great kids almost by herself. I was around on Friday night and the weekends, but not much else. I attended almost all the important events, but missed a lot of the activities that make memories. But I wound up being a roadie for their high school Marching Band when they won 3 Regional Competitions in a row. Those memories will last forever.
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Bullhunter
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Post by Bullhunter on Apr 3, 2012 8:10:14 GMT 9
Ron,,,that is an awesome family accomplishment.
:clap
My families likely would not make it through that. :2thumbsup
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Jim Scanlon (deceased)
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Post by Jim Scanlon (deceased) on Apr 7, 2012 9:01:20 GMT 9
I have been thinking about what I would consider my greatest achievement.
In reality it is an easy choice: Nothing I achieved was on my own.
Everything positive I ever did, was not me, but Jesus Christ living in me.
Those things that were negative?
Well, they were all my own doing, as I turned my back on the Lord and went my own way.
Humanly speaking, as I still happen to be a human, I count myself very blessed to be able to look back at things I can recognize as achievements.
Quitting high school in January 1952 and being accepted in to the Air Force.
Making it through Basic Training and being promoted to PFC.
Completing Airplane and Engine Mechanics Tech School in October 1952.
Both before my 18th birthday.
Then spending 20 years in the Air Force and retiring as a TSgt, when it would have been very possible, by my own actions, to have been booted long before twenty.
In those 20 years, as an aircraft mechanic, I never lost an airplane of which I was the crew chief, in peace-time or in combat.
Yet, my God given abilities as a mechanic, allowed me to care for a number of airplanes, at several bases, and I had a very low rate of aborts, and IFEs.
In may positions I held, I was serving well above my rank and AFSC.
I was selected to become a senior controller in Maintenance Control, being over several men with 2 or 3 ranks higher than mine.
I was married for 8 years to my first wife, before she died, and we had three children.
I remarried and had we two more children, and my bride raised all five.
We will celebrate being married 50 years on 2 February 2013, if the Lord allows.
That, in it self, is an achievement that brings me much joy.
For that, it was not me, but both of us, relying on the Lord.
After the Air Force years, I was able to attend Boise State University, gaining enough credits to qualify for an Associate of Arts degree.
Then I attended Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon, earning a Bachelor of Religious Education degree.
I, along with my bride, served for Twenty-five years with Village Missions.
During those 25 years, I was the pastor of several small churches in the Heartland of America.
Along the way, we raised 4 daughters and one son.
Our son served 20 years in the Air Force as an Air Traffic Controller and continues in that profession.
Two of our daughters' husbands served 20 years in the military, one in the Army and one in the Air Force.
One daughter became an elementary school music teacher, one a claims specialist with a large insurance company, one a librarian and one a gemologist.
Humanly speaking, I could be very proud of all I have done, and what my family has done.
However, I know the credit does not belong to me, but to the Lord Jesus Christ, as He led me through the years.
I am honored to have been given the opportunity to serve our Republic for 20 years, and then to serve small communities as their pastor for 25 years.
Nothing I achieved was on my own, but in cooperation with others, and listening to the Voice of the Spirit of God, as He spoke to me.
I am very honored to be a part of this Forum and to have been chosen to be the Chaplain for the Forum.
Finally, I am very honored and blessed to have you, my brothers and sisters in common service, my flellow Patriots, as my friends.
Jim Too
:god_bless_usa
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Post by steve201 (deceased) on Apr 7, 2012 13:11:00 GMT 9
well...that's not fair....I can't beat the lord on any airplane or submarine!!!......dang....that was a nice accomplishment jim!!!...can't beat raising a great family and service to country and god.....good man....
God Bless ya!! :thanks :salute :us_flag :patriotic-flagwaver :god_bless_usa
Steve
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Bullhunter
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Post by Bullhunter on Apr 7, 2012 16:03:56 GMT 9
That's for sure! :salute
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Post by steve201 (deceased) on Apr 10, 2012 4:02:18 GMT 9
ok...since the submarine is now razor blades and the sail (for you airdales..that's the thingy that sticks up)...is mounted on concrete pad as a memorial....I can talk about some of this stuff...so.. one morning I came walking into my office at mare island navshpyd and I'm met by my boss at my desk..just put my briefcase down and he walks up to me and tells me to get my safety toe shoes and hard hat and get down to drydock 3....they have some issues and trying to undock at 10:30...man..I haven't even had my morning hit of caffiene yet!!!...  plus I had to meet up with 3 people on the way....the lead engineer...the docking officer and the ships capt...!!!..ooooh man..this isn't going to be pretty...the SSN683 was going out on a priority 1 mission and they wanted the boat IN the water ready to go by midnite that nite....tides were extreme so this would enable them to undock the boat with plenty of room to spare from the dock sill..... so..off I go...time is 0730 and I'm already hitting the bricks at full tilt.... made it to drydock 3 and met up with the 3 officials....the lead engineer tells me what's wrong...now ...remember from my other post that this is a classified submarine ??..it's sitting on the bottom of the drydock and this one has features that are external to the hull...like 2 huge sponsons and a fwd and aft module that hangs off the bottom of the boat...fwd one has a winch and thrusters along with lights and cameras to watch what is going on under the boat.... on the fwd module they tried to install a new winch assy...which wouldn't work right so they re-installed the old winch assy...which worked..BUT!!!...the doors around it wouldn't close properly.....flooding the dock was going to happen at 10:30 and we needed those doors closed yesterday..on the doors were spools for coiling and stowing these huge electrical cables so they could be pulled and repaired on the surface if need be... so..with all three watching every friggin move I made....I grabbed a guy with a cutting torch...and a painter... we unloaded the cables off the spool and with a grease pencil...I marked where to cut the spool off or complety removed them depending on the doors....while this is going on you can see the cranes moving bins and forklifts out of the drydock....people running around taking stuff up the sides....scrambling to button things up..get the dock officer to sign things off ...all the while the torch guy would burn off something ..and the painter would run over and slap a coat of paint on it to prevent rusting while she was going out on a mission.....he was so fast I grabbed a door to check clearance and got a handful of paint!!!.....we stowed a couple of the cables to the inside frames of the thrusters module and called it good with cable ties to secure them from bouncing around or floating free.....at 1015am..we had the doors buttoned up...the jobs signed off and we were climbing the sides of the dock stairs to clear for flooding the dock......now to give you a picture of the size of the dry dock....it will hold 1 ea. battle ship or 2 full sized attack subs...they are monster holes in the ground..... well...they started flooding the dock while we were walking back to the office and I spent the rest of the day briefing the structures guys on what I did...the wire guys on what I did...and had several meetings with the shipyard commander over what I did so that the boat could hit it's mission requirements without the shipyard causing a delay......... to this day I still don't know where she was going....what she did...and why the mission was so hot to get her undocked and underway by midnite that nite...heck...the reactor wasn't even running and it takes 8 hrs to fire one off to make enough steam to get underway!!! Steve |
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Post by Bullhunter on Apr 11, 2012 13:16:11 GMT 9
This is another short story out of my CD/Book. Copy & paste makes it very easy.
Day-Care Center Incident
This incident is about the scariest I ever went through, and it involved my two children and the Sembach Air Base Daycare Center.
One cool foggy day at Sembach Air Base in West Germany I went to pick up my two children early from the daycare center. I guess it must have been just after lunch as I got the rest of the day off from work for some unknown reason.
I'd become a single parent with full custody of my two children. I liked to have extra time with my children whenever possible.
Civil engineers came out earlier that day to kill moles that were in the ground around the daycare center building. They filled the molehills and tunnels with some kind of gas and then left. When I came to pick up my two children the ladies up front at the counter could hardly talk and seemed ready to pass out. I knew something was wrong, and something slightly smelled odd, so I started an evacuation of the childcare center and called in an emergency situation by telephone.
When I got the emergency folks on the phone they wanted to know if there was a fire or what was wrong. I said "I don't know what the hell is wrong everyone seems screwed up like there is a gas leak or something and you need to get here now - lots of children around here!" At that particular time I did not know about CE gassing the moles.
Every fire truck, aid care, police vehicle, and Explosive Ordnance Detachment (EOD) vehicle showed up. All kinds of Officers running around, and then parents started to show up. When it was all over I did not even get a thank-you, job well done, extra day off, award, or anything.
After that incident I got my children in with a friend and his wife for babysitting. They had 3 girls about my kid’s ages. I did this because most of my TDY's were no notice and often took over night. Unless the base was on an alert the daycare center closed at night.
I learned later that because of the cool air and fog the gas that escaped from the ground did not rise up into the atmosphere but was held down by the cool moist air. Apparently they hadn't secured the mole hole openings very well.
This incident was pretty much kept hushed up and I don't remember ever seeing it printed in the base newspaper.
I don't know why I was given the rest of the day off that morning. I was just asked, “How would you like to go home early?” - and they did not have to ask me twice.
The Lord does work in strange ways. Guess maybe he used my supervisor and I to save the children and the daycare workers that foggy day.
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Post by Jeff Shannon on Jul 12, 2012 7:10:56 GMT 9
Just got done installing a new dishwasher,Home depot was suppose to install it when it was delivered, somehow, someone didn't get the message and the soonest they could get someone out here was 2 weeks from now...  ?, thanks but no thanks refund my money and I will do it myself. 45 mins they said......BS!....try 4 hours..first and last time I install one...old one went bad and we waited for the right time to get a new one. This house is wired sooo bad, turned off breaker marked kitchen, everything goes off cool, I cut the wire to strip back the leads for the dishwasher and damn near get kicked to the other side of the room...WTH...the breaker marked front room handles the switch which powers the dishwasher WHAT? The directions were written in hieroglyphics for all the good they did and who ever designed the water hook up under the the unit..well played..run and hide dickhead because if I ever find you your mine, I worked on aircraft easier than that...finally installed and ops check good, signed off! Beer time! :yellow-beer |
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Post by dude on Jul 12, 2012 9:25:12 GMT 9
 Know what you mean re: dishwasher wiring. I bought an 8KW generator for emergency power and had to have a transfer switch and subpanel put in. This caused me to go through the house for the first time checking what really went to what circuit breaker so I could figure out the loads. Turns out my dishwasher is wired to my freezer downstairs and a sump pump. Would never had guessed based on what the electrician had written on the panel. As far as personal accomplishment... For any old F-4C/D avionics heads out there, do you remember the I-level diagnostic tool that did the checkout of the firmware in the weapon system's computer platters? We had a contract to replace it and I was the lead engineer doing the system analysis to develop the signal tolerance logs the programmers would use to write the software for the new machine to do testing and diagnostics. In the course of doing so, I discovered a design flaw in the aircraft computer that made the right forward AIM-7 missile virtually useless against a target outside a 5 degree aspect angle. It had apparently been there since day one. I knew a couple ex-Master Sgts in the plant that had worked C/D avionics so I asked them what they could tell me about the right forward missile station. Both had the same answer, "That's where we hung the camera." When I asked why, they said, "Because we couldn't hit anything with it." This confirmed for me that I was on to something. Since the C/D was a front-line fighter in Nam, I couldn't help wonder how many pilots had experienced a bad day because of it. We of course alerted our Air Force customer, and they of course initially denied there was anything wrong. That earned me a couple trips to meet with their engineers and no surprise after a little chalkboard work they finally acknowledged there was a design problem. Since it was firmware, it could not be easily fixed. So they directed us to "test as is". The good news is this happened in the late '80s and the C/Ds were retired about a year later, which is why I can talk about it now.
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Post by dude on Aug 18, 2012 9:18:07 GMT 9
Yeah another personal triumph!!! Bought an 8kW generator earlier this year and finished integrating the transfer switch and a new 20 breaker subpanel with the house main utility panel without frying myself or the house. Got an electrician to inspect and sign off as meeting code. But the biggest plus was the wife was able use the handy dandy little Operations Manual I developed for her to set it up and turn it on without frying herself too. :tailed-devil
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Post by Gene on Aug 18, 2012 10:40:18 GMT 9
now that is a PLUS :2thumbsup was thinking about getting a backup gen until i found out i would need to rewire a whole new breaker panel...est $2800.00  |
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Post by LBer1568 on Aug 18, 2012 12:20:52 GMT 9
I went through Hurricane Otis in Ohio. We lost power for over a week. So I said no more. I had a portable gen 5500 watts, but water pump is 220 and I didn't get it wired. Without power no water, we have wells in country. I looked into Generac whole house generators. I could have gotten a 6,7,8,9 or10 kwatt generator and then wired in a subbreaker panel next to main breaker box. With that setup you choise which circuits you want powered. Problem is electrician wanted $1500 to install the sub panel. Subpanel was $900 plus installation.
So I looked at bigger whole house generators. Ended up with a 20k, powered by my propone tank. It simply puts a three way switch next to meter box. If commercial power is working, standby system only runs self test once a week. If power goes off it waits 30 seconds and if power not back on it powers up, throws breaker shutting of commercial input and powers the whole house. The big windstrorm we got at the end of June had power outage for 4 days. Mine powered up after 30 seconds of loss and ran for 4 days. Wife was even doing laundry and running A/C since temps were 95-101 in afternoons. My neighbor ran extension cord to run his frige and freezer as well as light etc.
We didn't miss a beat. Had cable tc for first day then it went down. So the wife got out her collections of movies to keep her happy. I had internet about half the time.
So if in country, standby generator system pays for itself. Just a nice insurance measure.
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Post by dude on Aug 18, 2012 13:04:43 GMT 9
I looked into whole house (Genrac and GE) but convenants would require me to bury the tank and trench to the house. Estimated it would cost me around $15,000 to put it all in based on a 15k gen and a 200 gal tank. In 25 years we've never been down more than 8 hours. So it didn't seem to warrant the grand smash. Got the generator, subpanel and parts at Lowes/Home Depot and ordered the switch and outside inlet through Amazon. All told I came in under $2,000 including cost of generator. I'm sourcing from the gen's 240vac, 30 amps outlet. It covers water pump, two fridges, one freezer, pellet stove and key lights. Four circuits total, but could add more if needed. Wired the system to accommodate 50 amps in case I upsize the gen downstream. Also considering adding an ammeter if I add more circuits.
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Post by LBer1568 on Aug 18, 2012 23:58:58 GMT 9
My 20 K Generac installed was about $5,500. That included a new gas regulator valve and plumbing from my existing propone tank to house.
I bought Generator on web and got free delivery to house. I used Generac's list of approved installation tech's to find local guy. Lowea's and Home Depot each wanted about $8,500 for teh same thing installed by "their" tech's. They estimated installation at $3,500. PS, The guy I used is also a registered installer at Lowes and HD. He charged me what they would pay him for same job. So Lowe's and HD make about $2,300 on install. More than the tech that does work.
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Post by pat perry on Aug 19, 2012 0:11:47 GMT 9
I went through Hurricane Otis in Ohio. We lost power for over a week. So I said no more. I had a portable gen 5500 watts, but water pump is 220 and I didn't get it wired. Without power no water, we have wells in country. I looked into Generac whole house generators. I could have gotten a 6,7,8,9 or10 kwatt generator and then wired in a subbreaker panel next to main breaker box. With that setup you choise which circuits you want powered. Problem is electrician wanted $1500 to install the sub panel. Subpanel was $900 plus installation. So I looked at bigger whole house generators. Ended up with a 20k, powered by my propone tank. It simply puts a three way switch next to meter box. If commercial power is working, standby system only runs self test once a week. If power goes off it waits 30 seconds and if power not back on it powers up, throws breaker shutting of commercial input and powers the whole house. The big windstrorm we got at the end of June had power outage for 4 days. Mine powered up after 30 seconds of loss and ran for 4 days. Wife was even doing laundry and running A/C since temps were 95-101 in afternoons. My neighbor ran extension cord to run his frige and freezer as well as light etc. We didn't miss a beat. Had cable tc for first day then it went down. So the wife got out her collections of movies to keep her happy. I had internet about half the time. So if in country, standby generator system pays for itself. Just a nice insurance measure. Lorin, What make and model was your 20K unit and approximate cost installed? I have a friend who is looking into getting a stand-by gen and this sounds like just what he needs. And it also sounds like what I'll need if I ever get to build there in East TN. Thanks, Pat P. |
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Post by dude on Aug 19, 2012 10:09:35 GMT 9
My 20 K Generac installed was about $5,500. That included a new gas regulator valve and plumbing from my existing propone tank to house. I bought Generator on web and got free delivery to house. I used Generac's list of approved installation tech's to find local guy. Lowea's and Home Depot each wanted about $8,500 for teh same thing installed by "their" tech's. They estimated installation at $3,500. PS, The guy I used is also a registered installer at Lowes and HD. He charged me what they would pay him for same job. So Lowe's and HD make about $2,300 on install. More than the tech that does work. Roger that. Found out the hard way that if you contract Lowes/HD to do the work, they hire a local guy and charge you at least twice his rate. |
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?, thanks but no thanks refund my money and I will do it myself. 45 mins they said......BS!....try 4 hours..first and last time I install one...old one went bad and we waited for the right time to get a new one. This house is wired sooo bad, turned off breaker marked kitchen, everything goes off cool, I cut the wire to strip back the leads for the dishwasher and damn near get kicked to the other side of the room...WTH...the breaker marked front room handles the switch which powers the dishwasher WHAT?
