Hello friends and Hivers. Today I will talk about my weekend which turned into work and how the actual work week got off to an early start. Now I knew before the start of my weekend this was certainly going to happen which was nice as it allowed me to plan around it.
Well after work on Friday I went fishing for about two hours. I only caught one small fish not pictured. Saturday I spent most of the day fishing and only caught the one fish which is pictured. This is a blue gill I caught and it's the largest one I have caught this year so far. I didn't measure but I guessing it was all of 11 inches.
The wind was incredibly crazy both days with gust up to 45 mph. It's not a lot of fun fishing in it. I'm glad to say I did not hook myself, there were some close calls though, @erikah. The wind made casting a challenge and detecting bites difficult with water being so choppy. I ended up at a smaller pond later to get away from choppy water but the wind wasn't any better. I took a lot of scenery pictures and some of a clubhouse of a club that I'm now a member of. I'll show those at another time.
Well Sunday came along and I knew at some point I needed to go into work. The original plan was to be into work at 9:00 p.m. and work close to three hours. Fortunately are inbound mechanical bird left earlier than scheduled and over flew one of its scheduled fuel stops before arriving to us. This changed our showtime to be into work at 4:00 p.m.
A fairly easy workload to deal with this time. Only three of us needed from my shop on this mission. We brought out a 60K Aircraft loader to take off two pallets and brought out a 10K forklift to put one single pallet onto the aircraft. I didn't manage to get pictures of the the forklift and the outbound pallet. The pallet was light and just contained some plastic dunnage, nothing extraordinary about it.
This inbound mission brought in remains that could possibly be former United States uniform members from previously conflicts, battles and wars. There is a particular way these transfer cases are loaded, positioned, and offloaded from the aircraft. The flags draped over them all face in the direction as shown in the first picture above (Nose of aircraft to rear of). It's absolutely a no-no to stack them unless there is too many of them to avoid. Once we offloaded the two pallets on the ramp we hung back a good two hundred yards from the plane.
We do not touch the transfer cases here. There is a team of individuals that do this detail. The aircraft ramp is fitted with toes (an extension to the ramp) and lowered. The toes allow vehicles to drive up or down and for people to walk safely up and down the ramp. Part of the detail were responsible for backing up trucks to the bottom of ramp to take the transfer cases.
There were two buses that brought the team in to conduct the remains transfer. This is performed in a ceremony procedure. The correct verbiage for this is a dignified transfer. With a total of 20 transfer cases this ceremony took around 40 minutes. Each case is carried by 6 individuals with a head person who directs the overall movement. Only one case is moved at any time. There were several teams of six that carried the cases.
These remains were collected in the European region and are likely from World War II. They come to the base where I work at because their is a laboratory here where DNA is abstracted from these remains and compared to a DNA database. It's a good thing to bring these fallen soldiers home after all these years. It also gives closures to the surviving descendents of the men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice.
Eventually I will write a more detailed article on this project. The organization that is responsible for it is The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). The organization does guided tours of its facilities showing most of its operations. I'll do this tour pretty soon I know some people 😊
Once the ceremony concluded we were able to the load the one pallet with the forklift. After that we went back to our cargo yard and offloaded the two pallets from the aircraft loader. I was off work around 7:00 p.m. and in bed sleeping by 8:30 p.m. as I had to be to work Monday morning at 4:00 a.m. to work more overtime.
I felt much like I was just here 😂 The morning's objective was to load 7 trucks. We waited well over an hour until the trucks arrived. It didn't take us too long as we worked several trucks simultaneously. Once done everyone but one was offered to work 8 hours straight and go home. I was the unlucky one as I was the person on call this week. Hey it's my turn, got to do my time and duty right? Someone has to man the shop during our normal business hours. Well it was a long Monday as I got off 4:30 p.m. I got home took a power nap to about 7:00 p.m and was back in bed for good at 10:00 p.m.
Well my weekend was cut short while at the same time my week started early. The money is nice and the time spent at work felt rewarding due to the type of missions I worked. Monday night I'm not going to lie I asked myself is the week almost over yet? Of course it's not but was feeling that I wish it was. Some of it has to do with the weather though, the weather is suppose to be nice all week and into the weekend!
This is all I have for you folks. Take care, stay safe and have a great rest of your week. Until next time!