Morning Vent, 24 May 2010

 That is no way to carry M60 ammo - Lemme take that!

    Went to sleep a bit early, then I woke up and couldn't doze off again. It looks like my training next week in Albany might segue right into my first 4 night work week. That means Reibo will have to hold down the fort at the HQ until I get back on June 2nd or 3rd. Yikes. I'll update as I find out myself. I'm hoping to have dinner with my work bud Hopper later tonight, but that all depends on how I feel after work.
    It's only a few days till the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 'Resurgence' map pack is released, and I'm totally meh. At the barbecue the other day, I spoke briefly with Ovary Assassin, a former work buddy who's a CoD player. He played a lot of core Call of Duty: World at War and made the jump to Modern Warfare 2. He mentioned that I'm not playing much MW2 anymore. I replied that not playing with a full crew made the game less fun for me, since I got my ass kicked a lot more. With his youthful reflexes, Ovary manages to dominate even without a full crew... I was gonna say that I might have done as well at his age, but they didn't have FPS video games in those days.
    A couple of days ago, one of my twitter buds, @LukeHall1995, noted that I tweet quite a few space-related links. Thinking on it now, it's due to one person: Richard Oswald, a friend of my older brother, Rick. Over 40 years ago, when I was 6 or 7, Rich Oswald gave me a couple of his own childhood books, 2 huge folio-size science books: One about dinosaurs and one about the Solar System. They were loaded with beautiful art, and they fascinated me like nothing ever had before - except girls, of course. Even after scientific progress had invalidated most of the theories in the books (the astronomy book was pre-Mariner 4, so the painted maps of Mars still had canals on them!), I still loved to read them and admire the imaginative depictions of dinosaurs and the surfaces of the other planets in the Solar System. Rich Oswald's generosity gave me a lifelong interest in science, especially the space sciences and paleontology. Tho it never led to a career in science, I still have a deep appreciation of all the sciences and knowledge in general. So, thank you, Richard Oswald, wherever you are.