Donna extended her stay in Las Vegas by a day, but not to look at more houses — our kids wanted her to make a favorite dish, stuffed grape leaves, so she stayed over Monday to cook. She and Polly should be on the road soon for the eight-hour drive home, and I’ll be making dinner to welcome them back.
On the house front, Donna looked at two places in our son’s subdivision, one of which she liked. It’s a small two-bedroom like our son’s, with virtually no yard. In Las Vegas, they build ’em as if water’s scarce, imagine that (casinos and resorts excepted). It’s in probate and won’t be on the market for a while, which gives us time to see what we can get for our house in Tucson and prepare an offer for when it does come on the market — but Donna’s starting to have the same kind of second thoughts I’ve had all along, that we’ll wind up bankrupting ourselves starting over and leave nothing for the kids when we’re gone.
I’m making a pot of stew for us to eat on TV trays while watching tonight’s debate. Which, like the last one, will be one-sided, but this time I hope to our side’s benefit: rapid fire attacks and lies from Trump, rational answers from Harris (punctuated, when he starts talking out of turn, dead mic or not, by Harris’ trademark “I’m speaking”). I pray she doesn’t let him rattle her. Just the sound of his voice rattles me, and I expect I’ll be shouting at the TV tonight.
You’d think the crudity of what Trump and Vance are saying, from threats to imprison anyone who votes the wrong way to accusing immigrants of stealing and eating our pets, would repel voters and ensure their defeat, but deplorables mainline that shit. As for the Russians in the shadows behind Trump and his MAGA strategists, paying incels and school-shooter types to sow rumors and panic on social media, the crudity of what they’re doing is a match for Trump’s. One pictures Ernst Blofeld stroking a Persian cat and chuckling to himself as Trump & Co. work American voters into a racist frenzy, turning them against one another while the wealthy pick their pockets for whatever they haven’t already stolen.
Never thought I’d be offering kudos to Dick Cheney, but here we are. Did I ever mention Cheney once had me kicked out of VIP quarters at Osan Air Base in Korea? That was back when he was secretary of defense and I was a defense contractor. In my job I visited USAF bases at home and overseas to train fighter pilots in crew resource management, traveling on orders giving me general officer rank, which entitled me to VIP quarters at bases I visited. Unless, that is, someone who outranked me turned up, which is what happened at Osan. That’s the closest our paths crossed, unless you count my teens, when I lived in Laramie and went to summer camp near Casper, Wyoming (my camp girlfriend was from Casper and might even have known the Cheneys, who must have been movers and shakers even back then).
This is an interesting development, at least to this old Air Force fighter pilot. By way of background, USAF pilot training operates on a two-track system. Student pilots selected to finish training in the supersonic T-38 Talon, a jet designed in the 1950s to fly like the USAF’s Century-series fighters, are on what’s called the fighter/bomber track. When they finish training, they move on to operational fighter and bomber assignments. Students selected to finish their training in the T-1 Jayhawk, a small business-style jet, will go on to fly tanker and cargo aircraft.
But now there’s a shortage of fighter and bomber assignments. I follow developments in pilot training and have seen chatter about this on social media. Well, now it’s official, with the USAF’s announcement of a new policy: if you graduate from pilot training on the fighter/bomber track and there isn’t a fighter or bomber for you, you’ll go fly tanker or cargo aircraft instead. Which is better than what happened during the last fighter/bomber shortage, when newly-minted pilots had to go sit in trailers and fly drones, and way way better than it was right after the Vietnam drawdown, when new pilots went straight to ICBM silos. So if I have anything to say to new USAF pilots today, it’s this: things could be worse! And have been!