It's official...

I guess this really qualifies as a blog now, I've gotten some posts up and even derived a comment from a fellow blogger.
So, I'm off today no "work outside the home" as my wife likes to say. Just a bunch of hunnydo's before my next trip.

More bad news for the Boy Scouts. Four Alaskans this time. Troop leaders electrocuted at the Boy Scout Jamboree. Our condolences to the families.

The shuttle Discovery went into orbit today, congrats to NASA on getting this far in their return to flight.

The Anchorage Daily News reported today on a procedural error by the Coast Guard in Valdez earlier this month. The real story is that the Coasties let two tankers into the Valdez narrows at once which is a no-no. The story is here http://www.adn.com/news/Alaska/story/6749164p-6637253c.html. I don't think that this is any big deal except for the guy in the VTC who screwed up. Maybe a little EMI (extra military instruction, for those who never had it) for the guys on watch at the VTC but that's about it. I don't think there was much to worry about especially since there was a two mile separation between them. After surviving one collision at sea I can understand the way different factors can snowball and contribute to an accident but I didn't see anything that would cause me to worry about the safety of the vessel traffic in and out of Prince William Sound in this story or in my past visits to the MSO/VTC in Valdez. Those Coasties are usually pretty thorough down there and there's so much oil money in Valdez that they can and have afforded a lot of spill prevention equipment and training for just about everyone that lives or works in that community. Whatever the enviro-whackos say, I don't think we'll see another Exxon Valdez type disaster in PWS unless it's a terrorist action.