Bears and Angry Birds

Regardless of where you live, when you move house, you take into consideration all the usual things like schools, location, walkability etc.  But when you move anywhere in America, it's a good idea to research the local wildlife too.  The scariest things here in TN are without doubt, the snakes, and unfortunately I've seen too many of those!  Apparently in Washington we won't have to worry about venomous snakes.  They do however, have bears and mountain lions.  Shitballs!  Do you play dead or act big and loud when you see a black bear?  I have no idea, time to do some research I guess.  Apparently we have to use special garbage cans in our new neighborhood to stop the bears foraging for food in your trash.  Yikes!  But truly, this is part of why I love living over here, there's definitely never a dull moment!

The kids and me went out for breakfast recently.   It's always a struggle to order tea over here.  Servers rarely understand that when I ask for milk on the side, it means I want it at the same time as my tea.  My tea duly arrived minus the milk.  I asked again.  And again.  15 minutes later (yes I'm sad, I timed it), my milk was brought to the table, but of course by now, my hot tea was bloody freezing.  I waited another 10 minutes for fresh, hot water, but I did eventually get my nice cuppa.  By the time our food arrived, I was kind of frustrated after the tea debacle, but looking forward to eating.  Ha!  Middle son ordered a pancake with a smiley face made out of fruit.  We were all about to get stuck in when the waitress decided to become Chatty Kathy.  She started talking about the pancake face and told my son that if he moved the apple slices, it would look like an angry bird.  I was looking like an angry bird myself by now, hungry and fed up waiting for my tea for so long.  I was about to say something when she took it upon herself to use her long, nasty fingernail to move my son's apple slices to make the angry bird face.  Ugh!  I told her we were in a hurry to eat, so she left and I removed the apple slices before I let my son eat.  Yes, worse things happen to your food while it's still in the kitchen, but I'd rather not see people touching it with their fingernails!  I wasn't feeling very generous by the time we left, so Chatty Kathy's tip wasn't very large...

This little episode reminded me of an experience we had in Korea.  The husband and me had popped in for a coffee somewhere and I ordered a latte.  The server was lovely as are most people there who work in stores, restaurants etc.  She was chatting away, we had no idea what she was saying but we nodded politely and smiled a lot.  Until... she was in the middle of making my latte when she took the spoon out of the mug, put it in her mouth, sucked it and returned it back into my mug.  For real.   She then presented it to me with a huge smile, like it was something very special.  Yes, it was indeed very special and there was no way in hell I was going to drink it.  I waited until she wasn't looking and dumped it into the trash can before slinking away silently.  She was such a nice girl that I really couldn't get angry, but man, how gross is that?! 

Anyway, eating out here is usually a good experience, so you'd think that by now I'd have learned to be more patient with the tea thing.  But nope, I still get a bit grumpy when it happens again and again.  Tea is very important to most of us Brits you know!  I did spot a Tea and Crumpets Cafe in Seattle when we visited, so I'll definitely be going there for a taste of the homeland when we live there.  Speaking of which, it's less than a month to go before our mega-drive to live in the land of bears!  Till next week folks!  
 

Working 9 to 5

For those of you who didn't already know, I spent 10 years in the Royal Air Force (RAF) as an Assistant Air Traffic Controller (AATC).  Those 10 years were amazing, I had so many opportunities to travel, meet fantastic people, drink lots and do things I'd never have dreamed of before.  I mostly loved my job, but looking back, some of the things we had to do in the line of work were pretty hilarious. 

On promotion to Corporal, I got to work in one of these:

The illustrious Runway Control Caravan

What the heck is that, I hear you say?  This my friends, is the Runway Control Caravan.  A big truck with a mobile control tower built in, a couple of pyrotechnic gun holes in the roof, communications, and of course a kettle so you could make a brew for yourself and the Bird Control people out and about on the airfield.  There was no loo in the Caravan, so if you had to go, it was outside on the grass, hopefully out of eyesight of the aircraft spotters usually in position around the airfield fence.  The US Air Force doesn't have these!  During flying, the van had to be parked on the side of the runway in use which meant a lot of driving this huge thing around then plugging and unplugging all the cables.  After night flying, you then had to pack up all the cables and tuck them in - mostly in the pitch dark.  Thank God The Walking Dead wasn't on in those days, it was scary enough as it was!! 

I also worked with these a lot:

LE58 portable runway lights

These big, heavy cumbersome things were the bane of our life.  When there was night flying going on, we had to line the entire runway with them so they would light the runway if the main lighting failed.  After flying was over, we had to go out in the pitch black and pick them all up again.  If it was warm weather, the lights would be covered in bugs and other nasties.  I HATED doing this job!!!!  They would sometimes leak acid too, so it wasn't a clean task.  The photo above is a recent one I took from google, the lights we worked with were OLD and not as pristine as these ones appear to be!

We also had to do a few stints at bird control.  To this day, I still can't believe I drove round an airfield playing tapes of birds in distress through a loud speaker to scare off birds from the airfield.  If there was a birdstrike on the runway, we would have to go out and scrape the remains off the runway, bag them up and take them for analysis.  Not a good job for a vegetarian!


We made and carried a lot of these:

More often than not, in mugs like these:

It wasn't uncommon to have to carry a tray of 10 cups of tea/coffee up the ladder-like stairs to local control.  Ha, can you imagine what Health and Safety would have to say about that nowadays?!

Another necessary evil in the world of ATC was the operation of this piece of equipment:

The Mu Meter

Another not so clean task, the 'lovely' mu meter had to be hitched to the back of the ATC landrover and driven up and down the runway when there was inclement weather to measure the friction.  Oh for fun!

So, I know a lot of people think of ATC people sitting on their butts or waving lollipops at planes, but there was a whole lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes back in my day.  Although I didn't really enjoy going around the airfield in the dark on my own, looking back, it was actually a lot of fun and pretty funny too really.  Now I'm going to go and sit on my sandbag and reminisce some more :)