Navy and Marines, Ready and Wasted

One of the bits I heard early on about the disaster was that the helicopter carrier USS Bataan was in position near New Orleans and arrived shortly after the hurricane passed over. Then I didn't hear much more about it, but I figured it just wasn't getting publicized. Nope. A floating power station, fresh water generator, and hospital, carrying a bunch of helicopters and boats, got ignored. I expect a certain level of incompetence in any organization. I know the logistics of getting heavy trucks through an area with damaged bridges is tough. But this pisses me off.

UPDATE: It looks like the helicopter squadron was used, running full out in fact. But the rest of the ship's capabilities, not so much.

What I've Been Up To

Haven't really been posting personal stuff lately--the rest of the world has been more interesting to talk about--but thought I should catch up.

The weekend before last we were still resting up from that nasty bug. jazz007 and kd5mdk came by to visit. We were glad to see them but didn't do a whole lot. Mostly we all sat around and read. They're kinda like family that way. That Saturday I went to arcbat and brigand13's post-Gencon party. Got introduced to Werewolf, which is an interesting live action game. Also met sadie_burdock08, shadeau_jed, and lots of other browncoats. arcbat and brigand13 had snagged a copy of the Serenity RPG for me, so I got to obsessively pore over that for the next few days.

This got alternated with trying to twist bkseiver's arm into coming up here to wait out the hurricane. She sat it out, and she and phoenixsinger are fine so I figure she's entitled to say "I told you so" next time we see her.

Not to be left out of new Serenity stuff to enjoy, celticdragonfly took sandy_tyras to see the free preview of the movie.

This weekend also started with some reading. We got the Serenity novelization and Visual Companion at Lone Star Comics (who needs Borders? The geeks are well served by LSC). The SOVC is great. Lots of raw material from Joss on what he thinks of it all and what he's trying to do. Plus the full script including bits cut later. And lots of lovely, lovely pictures.

Not, alas, the pictures I most wanted--the two views of the 'verse that could settle the map argument among the RPGers. One system? Many? How spread out? Joss doesn't really want to tell us, so we have to scrutinize the dropped crumbs of clues for the answers we want. Wish I'd asked celticdragonfly to check some of the key points in the moview to see how they matched the books, but I'll have to do it myself when it's released. Assuming I can pull myself out of the story enough to check background details . . . that may have to wait for the DVD.

The rest of this weekend went to cleaning. Lots of housecleaning, we'd let it slide while we were sick and needed to catch up. Monday went to the garage. We had dozens of boxes stacked up in there, some had been through more than one move with us already. So I went through them all and did a rough sort of keep/throw/give. celticdragonfly did the detailed sort through of the clothes to figure out what we wanted to keep for future kids and what we could give to the refugees. I had a lot of old work clothes that are in good shape but too small for me now. Those got donated. If I ever lose the weight (ha!), I can buy new clothes. Plus a lot of stuff was just trash. We did find a number of "that's where that was" items, so they come into the house. When the dust settled we'd gotten rid of a third of the boxes. Today I took a big pile of clothes and toys to one of the donation drop-offs. Hopefully they'll be useful for someone.