Sunday, February 8, 2009

I'm back

And in one piece too! As for as charter trips go, this was one of the better ones. We got 24 hours in the DC area and I met up with Old_NFO for a bit of fun. We went to the Sully wing of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. The cool bit is Jim knows a lot of the cool back stories of some of the airplanes there. Like the P-61 Black widow is in there because someone wanted to get married in front of one and he donated $500,000 for the privilege. Of course, the airplane was just rolled in, no restoration work was done on it at all. But there it sits.

We picked up the usual tourista doodads, they're in the mail tomorrow Rita.

After the museum, Jim casually mentions that he wants to go pick up a Winchester lever action that he dropped off for a cleaning at his smiths. We go in, and in a sort of "oh, by the way" way, he says he'd like to pick up a ambi-mag catch too. I'm turn to him and ask, "is that like the Norgon ones I've been looking for?" He looks at me like I'm crazy and says this is the place were the guy invented them.

It was a major DUH moment for me.

Let's see, I want to by Norgon Ambi-Mag Catch... they're made in Virginia... I'm in Virginia... Jim originally told me about them... Nope, I got nothing. Is all this supposed to mean something?

I met the inventor, picked up a ambi-mag catch at a great price and Jim's just chuckling away because apparently I can't put 1 and 1 together to make 2.

In my defense, 1 and 1 can equal 3 for sufficiently large values of 1.

We swung by a gun shop where I picked up more ammo. This time just a brick of CCI .22 ammo.

I then scammed Ambulance Driver's book Life, Death and Everything In Between: A Paramedic's Memoirs and an S.M. Stirling book out of Jim's library. I finished Conquistador this morning. I've got a plan for it too. More on that latter.

3 comments:

Old NFO said...

Glad I was able to provide a little fun for your day :-) I HATE being stuck on layovers with absolutely nothing to do! See ya next trip :-)

Haji said...

I don't really understand why it is that a cool night fighter like the P61 is hardly known. Maybe a decent movie would do the trick; its worked for most of the well known pursuit/attack planes. I guess the P61 and the Airacobra need some good press.

Old NFO said...

Haji- Partially because there are so few of them, and almost no combat footage as they were night fighters. There are NONE in the public arena at all.