I’ve been getting questions about Mercy and her story, well here are the basics.
We first got Mercy (not her name) when she was three weeks old as a foster child. Born with cocaine in her system and removed by DCS. We spent the first five month with withdrawal.
She had seizures and her muscles would tighten up. Throwing her head back and clench for a minute or two. Totally silent.
She also couldn’t sleep for more than twenty minutes or so at a time. Making her care pretty difficult for a working me and the wife giving aerobics classes. Eventually we started to swaddle her and she could sleep a lot more comfortably. She finally got through it but it wasn’t easy.
We went back and forth with DCs and the courts. She was returned to her birth mother twice. We found out much later that she tried to drown her in the bathtub. There was also a suicide attempt. We got her back the second time and decided to get a lawyer and fight for her.
Finally we got full custody of her and set the supervised visitation with the birth mother. She was about fifty-fifty on showing up. When she figured out that she was not getting her back, she got pregnant again. (Needed the meal ticket) and pretty much gave up on our girl
When we finally reached the magic numbers of one year of no support (we never got any and never expected any) and six months of no contact, we applied for a contested adoption. And changed her name to Mercy. She was almost five.
She was diagnosed early (4) with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Anxiety Disorder, Attachment Disorder.
She has since been diagnosed with DMDD and ADHD as she has gotten older and started to reach her teens.
Do we have issues from time to time? Of course we do. But she is ours. She will be thirteen in August
10. Noisy doors. You can’t walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They’re dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!” every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40
9. The Federation. This organization creeps me out. A planet-wide government that runs everything, and that has abolished money. A veritable planetary DMV. Oh sure, it looks like a cool place when you’re rocketing around in a Federation Starship, but I wonder how the guy driving a Federation dump truck feels about it?
And everyone has to wear those spandex uniforms. Here’s an important fact: Most people, you don’t want to see them in spandex. You’d pay good money to not have to see them. If money hadn’t been abolished, that is. So you’re screwed.
8. Reversing the Polarity. For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! It might work once in a while, but usually it just screws things up. I have it on good authority that the technicians at Starbase 12 HATE that. Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they’ve gotta go through the whole damned ship fixing stuff. “What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?” “Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity.”
Between Scotty’s poor lubrication habits and Geordi’s damned polarity reversing trick, it’s a wonder the Enterprise doesn’t just spontaneously explode whenever they put the juice to it.
7. Seatbelts. Yeah, I know this one is overdone, but you’d think that the first time an explosion caused the guy at the nav station to fly over the captain’s head with a good 8 feet of clearance, someone would say, “You know, we might think of inventing some furutistic restraining device to prevent that from happening.” So of course, they did make something like that for the second Enterprise (the first one blew up due to poor lubrication), but what was it? A hard plastic thing that’s locked over your thighs. Oh, I’ll bet THAT feels good in the corners. “Hey look! The leg-bars worked as advertised! There goes Kirk’s torso!”
6. No fuses. Every time there’s a power surge on the Enterprise the various stations and consoles explode in a shower of sparks and throw their seatbelt-less operators over Picard’s head. If we could get Giordi to stop reversing the polarity for a minute, we could get him to go shopping at the nearest Starship parts store and pick up a few fuses. And while he’s shopping, he could stop at an intergalactic IKEA and pick up a few chairs for the bridge personnel. If you’re going to put me in front of a fuseless exploding console all day, the least you could do is let me sit down.
5. Rule by committee. Here’s the difference between Star Trek and the best SF show on TV last year:
Star Trek:
Picard: “Arm photon torpedoes!” Riker: “Captain! Are you sure that’s wise?” Troi: “Captain! I’m picking up conflicting feelings about this! And, it appears that you’re a ‘fraidy cat.” Wesley: “Captain, I’m just an annoying punk, but I thought I should say something.” Worf: “Captain, can I push the button? This is giving me a big Klingon warrior chubby.” Giordi: “Captain, I think we should reverse the polarity on them first.” Picard: “I’m so confused. I’m going to go to my stateroom and look pensive.”
Firefly:
Captain: “Let’s shoot them.” Crewman: “Are you sure that’s wise?” Captain: “Do you know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I’ll BEAT YOU WITH until you realize who’s in command.” Crewman: “Aye Aye, sir!”
4. A Star Trek quiz: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and ‘Ensign Gomez’ beam down to a planet. Which one isn’t coming back?
3. Technobabble. The other night, I couldn’t get my car to start. I solved the problem by reversing the polarity of the car battery, and routing the power through my satellite dish. The resulting subspace plasma caused a rift in the space-time continuum, which created a quantum tunnelling effect that charged the protons in the engine core, thus starting my car. Child’s play, really. As a happy side-effect, I also now get the Spice Channel for free.
2. The Holodeck. I mean, it’s cool and all. But do you really believe that people would use it to re-create Sherlock Holmes mysteries and old-west saloons? Come on, we all know what the holodeck would be used for. And we also know what the worst job on the Enterprise would be: Having to squeegie the holodeck clean.
1. The Prime Directive. How stupid is this? Remember when Marvin the Martian was going to blow up the Earth, because it obstructed his view of Venus? And how Bugs Bunny stopped him by stealing the Illudium Q36 Space Modulator? Well, in the Star Trek universe, Bugs would be doing time. Probably in a room filled with Roseanne lookalikes wearing spandex uniforms, walking through doors going WHEET! all day. It would be hell. At least until the Kaboom. The Earth-shattering Kaboom
Hat tip to https://oldnfo.org/2019/07/10/snerk-26/
The lovely and long suffering wife, Mamasita Caliente, is doing well.
Hernia surgery and esophageal lengthening. She has five small (1 cm) incisions and stitches in her navel.
They gave her Dualdid for pain after surgery of .5 mg and then eight minutes later gave her 1.0 mg.
When she wouldn’t wake up and her O2 started dropping they checked her respiration and when it was 8 breaths per minute they called for help. At 5 they called a recovery team.
The nurse came around the bed and said “there’s about to be a lot of people in here”
Well, I wasn’t leaving, but I’m not stupid so I’m in the corner keeping my mouth shut. They wound up giving her a Narcan and when it didn’t work….gave her another.
She was in the hospital for three days and doing breathing treatments.
Still on a liquid diet for another week, but she is getting better everyday.
When I joined the US Army it was 1982. The standard helmet at the time was the “Steel Pot” which was just that. It had a fiberglass liner with a replaceable headband, used for guard duty and such. Not great but it was all there was.
During my time I transferred to the Kevlar helmet. It had better coverage and didn’t weigh as much. Without a liner it wasn’t the best for using to shave in.
Today’s military is into second or third generation helmets. That’s why this story interested me.
Staff Sgt. Bryan McQueen was nearing the end of his tour in Afghanistan with the 1st Security Forces Assistance Brigade on Sept. 3, 2018. He, his fellow soldiers and nearly 50 Afghans were headed to a security meeting, as routine as any other daily assignment.
Machine gun fire erupted.
McQueen felt what he could later only describe as a horse kick to the back of his head and he fell flat to the ground, landing on his face.
But in seconds he was on his feet with a simple question.
“Did these (expletive deleted) really just shoot me in the head?” he said.
The 7.62x54mmR round from the truck-mounted machine gun struck the back of McQueen’s helmet, shredding some of the materials but not penetrating the shell.
It’s true that soldiers have a morbid sense of humor. Keeping the bullet that was removed from them, a shell fragment that just missed them, and the helmet that saved them
This week that same helmet, bisected and mounted on a plaque with McQueen’s name and the appropriate unit coinage, was presented to him here at a Personal Protective Equipment soldier return ceremony.
For many years defense researchers and protective equipment programs have retrieved items such as body armor and helmets damaged by enemy fire on the battlefield for forensic analysis to improve current and future gear.
Brig. Gen. Anthony Potts, head of Program Executive Office Soldier, called the ceremony a chance to see the effect of the work that equipment programs do.
God bless SSG McQueen and his family. Equipment has made big strides in gear.
