It’s Wednesday again! Hope everyone had a great holiday season. Post your trackbacks, maybe someone will discover you here.

“Sea Story” of the day:

I had a “paper brain” that lived in my hands, being perused for the many items to be done and their status, or safely in my right seat pocket, with my wallet, which will further convey it’s relative importance. If was a 5″x8″ Day Timer with a leather cover and, believe me, it was well used in my XO days.

One day, somehow, I became “separated” from my separate memory. I believe it was after the end of a Planning Board for Training (PB4T) (held at 1300 on Thursdays weekly) while at sea on deployment. The anxiety level rose, but it was a busy day, and, after all, it couldn’t be over 453′ from me, unless it went for a swim…

It didn’t take long before an envelope was delivered to me by a watch messenger. It certainly didn’t appear that the wandering was enclosed, but, upon opening the message, I found two Polaroid pictures of said Day Timer. Both showed my almost sole source of recollection secured to a chair with the small nylon line used for the underway replenishment shot lines, and in one picture, a black gloved hand held a 1911A1 .45 caliber pistol, pointed at the Day Timer. Enclosed was a note, with some demand, beginning with “If you want to see your Day Timer alive again…”, yet, I had the Mater-at-Arms force on my side, so I chose to disregard any show of weakness.

Short moments later, the MA1 had dusted the pictures for fingerprints and, lo and behold, the miscreants had been careless, leaving their positive identification in my hands. The guilty parties were summoned to my stateroom and confronted, at which time, the leader of the pack handed over the missing collection of all tickler items to me. Chaos was fought back and the World restored to a right order.

You know, it gets boring at sea and the practical jokes sometimes get quite entertaining…..Somewhere, in a box in the attic is a set of Polaroid pictures, secured, after being used as evidence, for historical purposes.