The one thing that sucks about working for a hospital is scheduling. Every hospital that I have ever worked at sucks at writing work schedules. The schedule that comes out is either every 4 or every 6 weeks. The schedule begins on a Sunday. What would make the most sense is for the new schedule to come out a week or two before it begins.
That isn’t how it happens, though. The new schedule sometimes doesn’t come out until the day before it takes effect. You find out on Saturday what your work schedule is going to be on Sunday. That makes it difficult to plan vacations, trips, or even doctor’s appointments, when you don’t even know more than 3 or 4 weeks what days you are available
A couple in Sanford were checking out at WaWa when they noticed that a bottle of wine had been added to their order. They told the clerk that it wasn’t theirs, and the clerk took it off the bill. The woman behind them in line told the couple that it was her wine, then demanded that they pay for it. When they refused, she began beating them with the bottle, and knocked the male unconscious. The woman with the wine bottle was subsequently arrested for aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
I was reading that story to my wife, and I made the comment that, should someone do something like that to me, her ass would be shot long before she was able to hit me with the bottle and knock me out. My wife’s reply was, “I don’t think a jury would agree that shooting an unarmed woman is self defense.”
I pointed out to her that the wine bottle was definitely a weapon, and not only was there a risk of serious bodily injury, the man actually DID suffer serious bodily injury, as any blow to the head that results in unconsciousness is at least a concussion, and has a fair chance of resulting in death.
My wife is from New York State. The attitude that is fostered there when it comes to guns in pretty well known to those of us in the gun community. When we were first dating, she questioned why I felt the need to carry a gun and said that she had never needed one. She was open to listening, so I took her to the range. She eventually took some classes and got her CWP.
Still, she is a pacifist at heart. When we were first dating, we were at a baseball game (the Rays v the Yankees- she is a Yankees fan) and a fight broke out in the crowd. One of the trouble makers was being escorted out by a cop, and he decided to punch the cop in the face. The cop took the guy down hard with a leg sweep. The assailant landed on his face hard enough that I heard his face hit the concrete from 30 feet away. After it was over, she was visibly shaken, and told me that she doesn’t like violence, and it makes her sick to her stomach.
The terrorist attacks in Paris were a turning point. We were on vacation in France when the attacks took place. When we saw the news of the shooting, she turned to me and said, “When we get home, I want to take the concealed weapons safety course, so I can apply for a concealed weapons permit.”
Still, even though she has the CWP, she isn’t thrilled about using force.
I get it- she is a girl, and I am not married to the Sara Conner from Terminator 2. The reason I relate this story is that you will be tried by a jury of soccer moms who are likely less gun friendly than my wife is. Remember that when you are in a situation that may require you to use force. You also need to have a lawyer who is good enough to explain your shooting in a way that will get the jury to understand why you felt the need to use force.
So someone steals your car at gunpoint. You report it to the cops, who take a report and otherwise do nothing.
You and your friends then find your car. You attempt to retrieve it, but knowing that the thieves are armed, you make sure that you are, too. The thieves then produce weapons in furtherance of their crime. You shoot them in self defense.
The cops THEN decide to do something and arrest you for murder because you did the job that they are being paid to do, but don’t.
Now you are in court, and I somehow have made it on to the jury. I will vote not guilty, and if it were in my power, I would vote to have the government take the cost of your defense out of the pension fund of the local cops.
The hose that runs from the fire hydrant to the fire truck is called supply line. Most supply line is 3 inches or more in diameter, and in Central Florida, it’s usually 5 inches. (Orlando uses 4 inch, but that is because they typically have fire hydrants that are close together).
First, a bit of engineering.
The reason for this is hydrodynamics and friction loss. The average water main pressure is about 65 psi. At 1,000 gallons per minute, a 3 inch hose loses 80 pounds of pressure every 100 feet of hose length due to friction between the moving water and the hose itself, while a 4 inch diameter hose loses 20 pounds of pressure, and a 5 inch hose loses only 8 pounds. That means, if you want longer hose lays with high flow, the larger the diameter of your supply line, the better.
There is a lot of math involved in being the driver of a fire engine. You need to be able to calculate your friction losses in your head, rapidly, and remember that the lives of the guys in the burning building depend on you getting it correct. When you are flowing 2,000 gallons per minute through half a dozen different hose lines a 2 in the morning at a burning strip mall isn’t the time to realize that you are math deficient.
5 inch supply line has what is called a “sexless coupling” meaning that there is no male or female end, the couplings are interchangeable. This allows you to start laying from either the fire to the hydrant, called a reverse lay, or from the hydrant to the fire, called a forward lay. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but we won’t talk about that in this post.
My fire truck carried 1200 feet of 5 inch diameter supply line. That means with standard hydrant pressure, I could get a bit more than 800 gallons per minute into my engine without having to put another fire engine at the hydrant to boost pressure.
The problem with this is twofold:
5 inch hose is heavy. Each 100 foot section weighs a bit more than 100 pounds without water in it. Filled with water, that increases to over 1,000 pounds.
5 inch hose is bulky. The hose itself lays flat, but the couplings are a pain. The hose has to be loaded on the truck in a specific way, or it won’t come out of the truck correctly.
In Practice:
Both of these issues mean that 5 inch is a pain in the ass. It’s worth it, but that is not much consolation when you have to lay and reload 1200 feet of it. Anyhow, if loaded correctly, that hose comes out of the truck like a scalded dog. Like so:
I sympathize with the guys that this happened to. I once laid all 1200 feet of my supply line without meaning to when I was on the way to a large multi alarm fire. We hit a bump, the hose began laying out, and I dumped all 1200 feet in the middle of the road.
There was another time that the water department had removed a hydrant without telling the fire department. I arrived at a fire at 2 o’clock in the morning with the assignment of “secure the water supply.” I decided to do what is called a reverse lay.
So I began laying my supply hose at the fire, and headed to where I thought the closest hydrant was. 1,000 feet later, I arrived at where the hydrant was (or so I thought) and it was no longer there. After the fire was out, the other guys on the engine were not happy with me at all as we loaded all thousand pounds of hose back onto the truck.
The reason for that, is the hose is loaded by the driver backing over the hose as firefighters standing on the back of the truck lift it and load it back on the truck. The driver doesn’t do a thing but drive, the firefighters load the hose. I wasn’t a popular guy that night…
For those who are interested, the amount of hose and other equipment carried on the engine I was assigned to for the last six years of my career as a firefighter was pretty impressive. We had:
1200 feet of 5 inch supply line
300 feet of 3 inch supply line
a single 30 foot piece of 5 inch supply line in the side running board
a 250 foot length of 2 1/2 inch line preconnected to a smooth bore nozzle (cross lay)
a 300 foot piece of 2 1/2 inch line preconnected to a gated wye
a pair of 1 3/4 inch line that were 200 feet each, with nozzles connected to them (cross lays)
a 100 foot long 1 3/4 inch “trash line” on the front bumper
another 200 feet of 2 1/2 inch line, and 300 feet of 1 3/4 inch line in the storage compartments.
a “high rise pack” with another 200 feet of 1 3/4 inch hose in it.
That comes to 4,000 feet of hose. Plus all of the connectors, hose tools, breathing apparatus, spare air bottles, medical equipment, thermal cameras, 100 gallons of various types of foam, a set of hydraulic rescue tools, air tools, hand tools, flashlights, a gasoline powered fan, a power saw, extension cords, 2 chain saws, 6 axes, a set of pneumatic lift bags, 2 cases of Gatoraide, 2 boxes of energy bars, and a dozen other tools. The truck itself has a 1500 gallon per minute pump, a 10 kw generator, and 1,000 gallons of firefighting water onboard. In all, there were more than 10,000 pounds of equipment and supplies on that truck.
I loved driving and working off of that engine. I did everything on that truck- I rode as firefighter, paramedic, driver, and even as the officer in charge. There are times that I miss doing it. Life was easier and less complicated then. All I had to do was put the wet stuff on the red stuff.
Former SCOTUS Chief Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has died. My feelings on her decisions are mixed.
She allowed race to be considered in college admissions, thereby giving the SCOTUS stamp of approval on affirmative action in education. Grutter v. Bollinger
Still, I am a nurse thanks to her swing vote in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, where she ruled that nursing schools had to permit men to apply.
In Lawrence v. Texas, she said that laws against sodomy were an unconstitutional intrusion into people’s bedrooms, but that marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples “to preserve the traditional institution of marriage.”
She cast decisions approving partial birth abortion, which is nothing but murder in my opinion. Stenberg v. Carhart
She cast the deciding vote on the Bush v. Gore case in 2000. She later admitted to regretting it.
I found a link to the actual text of the bill. Here it is, hosted here at Sector Ocho. It begins with dishonest bullshit definitions. The definition of “gas operated” are wrong:
The term ‘gas-operated’, with respect to a semi-automatic firearm, means any firearm that harnesses or traps a portion of the high-pressure gas from a fired cartridge to cycle the action using— ‘‘(A) a long stroke piston, where gas is vented from the barrel to a piston that is mechanically fixed to the bolt group and moves to cycle the action; ‘‘(B) a short stroke piston, where gas is vented from the barrel to a piston that moves separately from the bolt group so that the energy is imparted through a gas piston to cycle the action; ‘(C) a system that traps and vents gas from either the barrel or the chamber to directly strike or impinge the bolt, bolt carrier, or slide assembly, to unlock and cycle the action; ‘‘(D) a hybrid system that combines elements of a system described in subparagraph (C) with a system described in subparagraph (A) or (B) to capture gas vented from the barrel to cycle the action; ‘‘(E) a blowback-operated system that directly utilizes the expanding gases of the ignited propellant powder acting on the cartridge case to drive the breechblock or breech bolt rearward; or ‘‘(F) a recoil-operated system that utilizes the recoil force to unlock the breech bolt and then to complete the cycle of extracting, ejecting, and reloading.
As far as I can think of, there are no other means of operating a semi-automatic firearm. This law defines all semi-automatic firearms as being “gas operated” by making the definition extremely broad. So what, exactly are they planning to do to these gas operated firearms?
The law goes on to say that no one can import, sell, manufacture, transfer, receive, or possess any gas operated firearm or combination of parts that operates like a gas operated firearm, nor can you own any mechanical or electrical parts that can make a firearm approximate the rate of fire of a machine gun.
It grandfathers in firearms owned before the date of the proposed law by the person who owned it on that date and their immediate family members. For the firearm to be transferred from one person to a family member, it has to go through a dealer. I’m assuming that, if a firearm isn’t transferred to a family member, it will be confiscated using the “voluntary buyback” clause in this law.
It requires all new magazines that are capable of holding more than ten rounds be inscribed with a serial number. All magazines that are sold from that point forward can only be owned by the government.
The law goes on to say that any unserialized magazine can’t be transferred after the date of enactment.
It also says that before any new design of a semi-automatic firearm is allowed to be sold, the plans have to be submitted to the ATF for approval. The ATF has 240 days to review the firearm and either approve or deny the application.
IN GENERAL.—Any semi-automatic firearm designed on or after the date of enactment of this section shall be required to have an approval under this subsection prior to the manufacture, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, of such firearm for sale to civilians.
The law also says that at any time, the Director of the ATF can remove a previously approved firearm from the list.
A man led Citrus county sheriff’s deputies on a high speed chase, dumping bags of fentanyl out the window of the car as he went. He finally wrecked the car in neighboring Marion county when he hit a telephone pole. He bailed out of the vehicle with a slug rifle. Police shot him. Of course a bystander caught the end on video.
The man’s name was Skyler Dan Wentworth, DOB 2/16/1990. His publicly available criminal record goes back to March of 2007, when he was arrested for felony burglary and petit theft (second offense), meaning of course that there are juvenile convictions that we can’t see. That case was dropped when the main witness, the victim, refused to testify.
The decedent’s background
He was arrested for a total of 3 felonies and 2 misdemeanors before his 18th birthday. By the time trial concluded on the felonies, it was 2012. He was sentenced to 2 years in jail on the second of them, 9 months for the third. That’s important because, as a convicted felon, he couldn’t possess a firearm or ammunition.
In all, he has a total of 15 felony cases, involving dozens of criminal violations, and 9 different misdemeanor cases. His driver’s license has been suspended multiple times, but he keeps getting caught driving anyway. By 2018, he had advanced to possession of firearms by a felon, charges related to drug dealing, illegally carrying a concealed weapon, and had been convicted multiple times for fleeing police and getting in accidents that injured innocents who just happened to be in his way. A real pillar of the community.
This choirboy’s mother appeared on TV, demanding to know why police didn’t just “taser” him. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why couldn’t they have Tased him? Why shoot him?” That isn’t how a Taser works, as my readers all know.
I couldn’t find a copy of the raw video, and I hate using media provided video because it is always edited and manipulated to distort what actually happened, but in this case, you can see 43 seconds into the video here that the man is on his knees with both hands on his head before dropping one hand down to what appears to be a rifle clung across his chest.
Looks like a good shoot, but I will post more on this if I find anything.