Mishmash.

--Without going into details, that free iPhone tracker app works. Stick it on your kid's phone, with the settings so that only the account holder can see where it is. Also works for your own phone, if you trust the phone company with that info. Lots do, lots don't.

--My new FD bunker gear came in again, with the proper color striping on it. (It had designated me a captain, before.) It's so clean. It has no odor. No smoke or sweat or mud. It has never been anyone else's before. It has a drag strap on the back. It has my name on the back in 4 inch tall reflective letters. Between that and my professional tag over my locker, I really feel like I am a member of the team. One of the firefighters laughed and said, "Hey, you finally are somebody!" I actually kind of got that feeling, too.

--I worked a house fire recently. The ambient temperature in the shade was 101 degrees when we arrived. We fought mostly to save a portion of the house, which we did. But we lost a lot of it. Wearing an insulated suit with a cowl over your neck really makes you hot before putting on that SCBA and going into a smoke-filled hot burning building. This in turn makes you suck harder on that air. No one much talks about the cooling effect of the gas expansion from that sweet compressed air. The simple desire to get cooler can make you take bigger gasps so that a tank that should give about 30 minutes lasts about 10 minutes. Or less.

--Note to the President: With the recent murder of our US ambassador to Libya, I wonder where our recently-decommissioned FB-111s* went. Are they mothballed? Did we sell them to other countries? What would it take to re-commission them? Oh, I know that there are other planes serving their old role just fine, or better (see: B1B Lancer). But I think that the psychological impact of a Tripoli sky full of Aardvarks again would be worth something. 

With an average speed of 600kmph, it should take a hair less than 9 hours to get a flight of Lancers there. Mr. President, if you want me to believe that you're a tough guy, get off the whole "I gave the order to the guy who gave the order to the guy who told the guys to kill Bin Laden." Instead, put on your game face, pick up the phone, and convince Spanish PM Rajoy that he'll hardly notice a squadron of jets flying 5 miles over the neck of the Iberian Peninsula.

I know that you like to have crib notes, so here's your flight plan, which I made just for you:

Click To Embiggen.

--My suggestion? Drop a few hundred GPS-guided inert practice bombs on our own embassy in Tripoli. It's our soil, after all. The kinetic kill to those who hoisted the black flag over our soil will be just as real, and the message sent just as strong: "We could have made this hit using a conventional bomb, or a fuel-air bomb, or even nucs. And we did it with obsolete planes. Don't piss us off." No collateral damage. Just stack one nose cone into the fins of the previous practice bomb.

--I'm taking PADM 5010 at university this semester. "Wow, graduate Public Administration courses are so exhilarating!" said no one, ever. I'm waiting for my books to arrive. If I hadn't bought them used on Amazon, I'd have been out $250 to $400. As it is, I'm out about $100 for books for one three hour course.

--I took an off-duty job last week guarding a bridge over an interstate highway. It didn't go anywhere. I went up onto it and took a camera phone picture of the traffic going by underneath.

--When I stepped barefoot outside to get the mail this morning, I found some public works guys picking up branches and throwing in the back of a truck, so I helped them. When my shirt rode up while pitching brush, one of them laughed that I had a pistol holstered. Yeah, if I've got on pants, I do. The family of the late former sheriff and police chief Herbert Proffitt undoubtedly wishes that he had done so, to.  Proffitt was 82 and recently retired for the second time, when while checking his mail he was gunned down by a former customer of his, harboring a 40 year grudge.  It is your duty to make it hard for them to kill you, and/or your tribe. Do your duty.  Otherwise, someone else is going to have to clean that mess up, and that involves apprehending the right desperate armed murderer without getting hurt. What's the first step in dealing with a snake bite? Kill the snake.

--I'm about to try to step up for a local citizen that's without much resources. We'll see if I don't screw this up.

--My brother and I talked a bit today about religion. I was surprised at how close we were were on the subject, which we hadn't talked about in some years. But it was one of those conversations where neither one of us would have gotten upset if we had discovered that we were at opposite ends of the spectrum, either. I am happy that he and I are at this easy-going place in our relationship.

--With a high of 75 this weekend, we may have finally made it through the long hot death march of summer. But I don't trust it not to give me triple digit temperatures again, until I'm well into the second half of my second month ending with -er.

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* Ask your National Security Advisor to get you Condi Rice's number, and ask her what these are. Don't rely on your party's defense guys to get this one right!