Funny, innit:

So this dude went around and sprayed people with high power water guns, and is now charged with assault.

For spraying them with water.  Lots of water, apparently. Yes, if you stretch it, it is assault. He was charged and should end up doing some time.

And yet, Federal officers in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement went around last year and shot innocent people with Pepperballs, and got away with it. Not  harmless (if irritating) water, but pepper balls and pepper spray. They did it in Chicago, they did it in Dallas.. Minneapolis and Philadelphia….shot protesters at their detention facilities, and they shot at innocents in fully half of the raids they did across the country, where they shot pepperballs and pepper spray at anyone who happened to be near the person they were arresting, interfering or not. and they did it with impunity. There’s lots of video proof, yet nothing happened to them. No ICE or CBP officer got charged with assault or anything else.

Not relatively harmless water, but Pepperballs. You know: pepper based paintballs.

Why did they get away with it?

Double standards for Federal officers leads to Bad Things.

what it really mean to rely on “Renewables” and how much money they have wasted on windmills and other “green” power sources

As they look at rolling blackouts and other methods to save power because the wind is not blowing, the windmills are not turning and the rest of the conventional (Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear and “imported” power) , supply sources are maxxed out:

The energy grid operator has warned that the “extreme temperatures” from this week’s heatwave could hit power supplies on Thursday night, as households’ use of fans and air conditioner place a record strain on our electricity system. 

It is Neso’s second warning in as many months. The group was forced to call for more power during June’s heatwave, which saw temperatures saw to a record 37.7C.

You’d think they’d learn, but they don’t. And the British people just keep electing idiots that push for more “renewables” that fail when they are needed most and that cannot be relied upon, unlike conventional generation plants….

You gotta wonder what happened to the British people, they once had a country that effectively ruled half the world, and now they can’t even keep their own lights on. Once they were a fierce formidable nation of hardworking self supporting people, now they hide in the dark and let their country be overtaken by idiots with a poorly thought out agenda

When no one got worried about the whole “HantaVirus” thing, it just………died away.

Strange, innit?

So we were on our way!!

The Beemer (a 740i ) is a nice car for a road trip….While I preferred the Honda Accord, I can see the allure.

It drives like a 1970’s Lincoln Continental….a real land yacht. Lots of power (the model I had was a hybrid, and the combination of gas engine and electric motor made for a fairly powerful car): decent, if not great handling…Lots of technology….too much, really. It took some getting used to, and honestly, the adaptive cruise was better on the Honda. The sound system was good, the seats comfortable and the thing would easily do twice the speed limit (I am told that it will….I, of course, a law abiding citizen, would never drive that fast)….

Lots of room, but the tech (all screens, no buttons, no knobs) was hard to deal with and the thing was blinged out: lots of crystal and other flash….I am not the target demographic for this car.  More for the demographic that likes gold teeth and such…..

Anyway, we dropped off my car at the hangar we expected to arrive at later (my hangar) and made our way to I-90 with my EZ-Pass on the windshield and headed East at speed.

7 hours or so later, having made one stop, we had arrived:

The car:

This car, while not a “performance” BMW, did have decent power and speed. It was a pretty nice car for a road trip. Comfy and smooth, even if the handling was lacking.

Kinda like driving your moms living room couch across the country.

I do have to say that I was impressed with the mileage out on the highway though: 33 mpg at highway (+)  speeds with the air on.

We arrived that evening just in time for thunderstorms to hit, so we stayed in and ate snacks before turning in.

So they called Tuesday afternoon and said that the starter had arrived (and it was, surprisingly, the CORRECT starter, which isn’t always the case when it comes to parts procurement these days, be it auto, agricultural, or aviation…..)

Anyway, they said they would put the starter on, start both engines, charge the battery, check everything out and I could have the plane back by Wed at noon…which, sadly I could not do. Instead I arranged to pick it up Thursday morning.

I called Enterprise and attempted to get the main reservations desk to set up a one way to where the plane was….Nope.

My choices of rental car places is limited in NW Indiana. There isn’t all that many places or companies that do rentals, and none of them wanted to do one way on a holiday weekend. …or at least the national call centers didn’t.

I called my local Enterprise place (where I had returned the one-way Honda Accord a few days prior) and the manager there said he could indeed find a car for me for a one way trip.

He finagled the paperwork, worked the system, lied to the computers….and I soon got an email that said that I was good for a one week rental, but that I could drop it off anywhere….Which was his way of making it a one way to satisfy the system and get me what I wanted.

So Wed noon I showed up to pick up the rental.  MC wanted to go with me so it worked out. As we pulled up I saw the gray BMW in the parking lot waiting, and jokingly said “I bet that’s the one” (hoping it wasn’t….)

I was wrong…It was the car.

It was a BMW 740i. The manager of the rental place wanted it off his inventory and so it worked out for both of us. Same price as a smaller car, so it didn’t matter to me.

We did the paperwork, fired up the Beemer (really weird controls for that), dropped my car off at my hangar, and were on the road!

Basically it is I-90 going east for 625 miles until you take the exit for the airport….

and that’s what we did. I had snacks, drinks in a cooler, an overnight bag, an IPhone with a 20 hour playlist set on Shuffle…..

and off we went!

“Common sense is not so common”

“No” is a complete sentence. Nothing needs to be added to it.

“No one who makes you feel small is worth listening to”

“Always assume that Murphy’s Law is a fundamental force in this universe”

“Listen to the silence before making big decisions”

“Listen not only to a person’s words, but to their silences also”

“Try before you quit”

“The capacity to learn is a gift, the will to do so, a choice”

“No one will care how you bleed”

So I was moving though my Monday, dealing with the lack of sleep (although I wasn’t that tired, honestly) getting back in the groove after being gone for 4 days.

And that afternoon, I got a call:  they had found a reman starter for the TSIO520 on the plane.

(You’d think that it would be easy, but I called around also and no one had one in stock). Aircraft Spruce listed new and reman Skytech starters, but had no stock and could not get one for a week. They also listed the Hartzell (Teledyne) version (that came with the engine from the factory), but not available for a week either.

Everyone else had rebuilt ones at about $2k and new for about $2800 plus shipping.

These guys got me a rebuilt starter with a warranty for $2075 including overnight shipping.

I bit the bullet and told ’em to order it.

(A side note: Many airplane parts are expensive, and some perhaps can be justified to need to be, After all, if the magneto craps out, you have no spark, and that’s why there is redundancy built into the engines and other airplane systems,,,but sometimes they just charge way too much for parts that are not significantly different that what we have on automobiles (or even tractors) ….I mean, if the starter fails on an airplane, it isn’t like the plane falls out of the sky, after all… The engine just doesn’t start)  But the parts are still 5X more expensive that the nearly identical non-aviation part…..

Anyway, it isn’t like I had a choice, so I sucked it up and told them to procure the starter.

At the end of it, it could have been worse…..The starter could  failed at the super secret point where I dropped the kids off, where there was no mechanic, nearest one 2 hours drive time away….and where the are no rental cars……In fact, no services at all….Just a runway and a few buildings…..

Instead it failed where there was a mechanic, and where there were other services.

It isn’t, after all, a question of if a starter is gonna fail, but WHEN the starter will fail….

I kinda look at it as it could have been a lot worse time-and-money wise. After all, if I didn’t want to spend money I should have taken up a hobby like bowling or archery or badminton or wild women or something less expensive… (Hookers and Blow are a bargain compared to aviation)

More later….

I mean, they use code words like “Teens” and “Youths”  and “Feral” to tell us all what kinds of people they are reporting on….

“Blonde female cop beaten by group of Feral Teens”

But the media never says “Black”, or “African”

Why won’t the media face the truth and say it? What are they afraid of?

Unless, and Until we start telling it like it is, that the behvior of certain groups (especially blacks), is bad, and unacceptable, we are never gonna have a chance to fix it.

Hiding it in code words is just stupid. So is making excuses for the behavior.

Black activists be damned. They are part of the problem.

(When we last left our intrepid travelers, before the Independence Day holiday, they had just left on their journey back home via rental car…..leaving the 340 to be repaired…)

So I get back home Monday Morning about 3:30 AM .  Drop MC off at her place and pulled the rental car into the driveway….and fell face down into my pillow. I may have taken off my shoes, IDK.  Long day and lots of driving (some of it in thunderstorms) had worn me out. I don’t do 22 hour days anymore. I must be getting old…..

The sun woke me up about 6:15 AM though. Old habits die hard, and when the sun comes up, I get up. Even now that I no longer have to.

At 7:45 AM I get a text from the mechanic dude…..He pulled the cowling and found the left starter with a Teeny-Tiny issue:

The theory is that the brush holder failed (It appears to be an original Cessna/Continetal starter, and I don’t care enough to go back through 40 years of logbooks to find when (or if) it was ever replaced). And they didn’t wanna open it up as that might mean that we lose the core return value, ($450) so we left it alone…

I told him to find a new or reman unit and let me know.

I then got a call from MC, who had also woken up and was ready to face her day, and she agreed to meet me at the car rental place so I could return the car…As long as I bought her breakfast…

The car, a nearly brand new (2100 miles!) Honda Accord, was a pretty nice car. especially for a rental. Comfortable seats, good (not awesome, not sporty, but decent) handling, adaptive cruise control, Decent sound system…all I needed (Although I would have been satisfied if they’d given me a 2000 Geo Metro with a half million miles and a broken AM radio,  I mean, after hours on a Sunday,,,,I just wanted to get home) Anyway, as I said, a pretty nice car. It got an honest 40 MPG even at the speeds I drove it (Honest, I kept it 5 MPH under the speed limit all 700 miles)…..

Eyewitness reports of speeds over 95 mph for many tens of miles at a time have misidentified the car, I am certain)

We returned the car and got a late breakfast…

More to come as I get time to write.

That July 4th,….Independence Day….is the real “No Kings” protest day.

The liberals can suck it.