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Showing posts from May 12, 2024

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...

Tesla Camping-- being remote.

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Last week I had a number of late meetings for work. My current commute is 50 miles each way and I do it twice a week. The Tesla has been very helpful. It is cheaper to run, it drives itself (yes, I use Full Self Drive (FSD)-Supervised). But also this past week, since I had to make the trip more times with less reason to go home, I decided to rent a campsite at a Bartow County campsite. I would sleep in the Tesla Model Y. It all adds up. The need to be local in Bartow County, a beautiful and quiet lakeside retreat, an SUV with air mattress, specialized HVAC (Tesla "Camping Mode") and electric hook-up to charge the car, and the amenities of a shower, toilets and all the basic domestic requirements. I like my sleep. It went well.

AeroVentures, Inc.

I noticed that often I don't post about things that have been important/changing to me. It's a bit like forgetting to take a picture when something crazy happens, even when the camera is in your hand. Journalists are trained to take the picture first then worry about everything else. I felt I did a better job taking pics in uncomfortable situations when I was in Africa. I was yelled at, threatened, scorned, and vastly outnumbered. It was uncomfortable. But, I did what I needed to do to get the result I wanted. (Video would have better in capturing some of the adversity I created.) Aeroventures is my flying club with about 150 members and about a million dollars in assets. There has been some incredible tension with the board of directors for over a year. I joined the board in that period because of the tension. I figured it would be a skill developer. “Calm seas never made a good sailor.”--Franklin D Roosevelt It was indeed a skill developer. Eventually, there was legal a...