High Desert Life

Let us all meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
Mother Teresa

Happy New Year!

When you have a chance check out "Joe Alaska's " Blog. Great Picture of a Kodiak Helo landing on a Shell Oil Rig which was adrift off Kodiak. The post just below it has the complete story !!!!

Happy New Year, calpoppy! I've been a touch absent, but I've enjoyed your postings tremendously - and those sledding penguins are the absolute best. I'm hoping the new year brings you all good things - and us? maybe more pictures of Joshua trees in show!

Have a great New Year!

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.

~ Ellen Goodman

Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

:)
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"IT'S AGROUND!!!!!

Oh Boy! Grout cleaning - Fun :) Snow not lasting?
I'll have Mrs WTS wave to your son and family as she flies in to Ketchikan on Monday for a week of training for a new client! Brrrr.. (although it is supposed to be 40s-30s while she is there, not really that cold) (unless you are from SoCal!)

NO!!! And you promised! ;)
Still have a runny (but not stuffy) nose and plugged ears. Really it's just the cough that's dragging me down. I'll give it a week and then go drug seeking.

You can make a lot of scarves just by making samplers with a 400 stitch dictionary! That'll be fun to play with!

Hey I did something ultra-knitterly yesterday. I had forgotten to make a cable three rows back and fixed it without tinking. How cool is that? I felt very smart and powerful, LOL
But, I should have quit while I was ahead. Seems my overall knitting juju was on the fritz and I later made another mistake (actually mis-knit an entire row) that I didn't catch for a couple of rows. I set it aside and picked up a book!
For sharing: this is the blanket I'm making for my niece - Buzzy Bee Blanket. Cute and close to Steelers colors so should be a hit.

Are you doing that grout cleaning with a toothbrush, in the proper military style? There's gotta be a better way, doesn't there? I mean, short of not having any grout? Sometimes I wonder if it's more trouble than it's worth.

Be sure to use knee pads!

Fly By. Hello to the critters :)

Hi Cal and a very Happy New Year to you. I saw this. You probably have seen it but just in case you haven't. Here it is: Miss Nadia has kept me up to date.

KODIAK -- Even for experienced U.S. Coast Guard crews, the situation with the Kulluk was hairy.

The December easterly storm in the Gulf of Alaska was blowing hard. A week into a month-long journey that began Dec. 21 from Dutch Harbor to the Seattle area for off-season maintenance, Royal Dutch Shell's prized oil drilling rig had broken its tow in 20-plus-foot seas and 45-mph winds. The Kulluk was tethered back onto a Shell-contracting towing ship, the massive, brand-new, $200 million Aiviq, with a backup towline.

Then, early on Dec. 28, all four engines on the Aiviq failed.

The Shell-owned Kulluk is a complex contraption to maneuver. It cannot propel itself, so when it breaks from the tow it's a runaway rig at sea. It's round, 266 feet in diameter and weighs just less than 28,000 tons -- more than 50 million pounds, Shell says.

The Aiviq, built for Shell and owned by Louisiana-based Edison Chouest with a crew of 24 on board, was struggling to use its thrusters to hold a position. Aboard the Kulluk was a skeleton crew of 18 working for Shell contractor Noble Drilling Corp. The Aiviq's engines were eventually repaired and restarted. Various ships tried to establish towlines over the next few days but the lines kept breaking and had to be shackled together.

"The conditions of the lines, they had previously broke. They weren't fresh, new lines," said Coast Guard Capt. Paul Mehler, who is overseeing the federal response to the Kulluk grounding.

At Air Station Kodiak, Cmdr. Mark Vislay, the base operations officer, was marshaling air crews in preparation for the worst-case scenario: people tossed into the churning, frigid, unforgiving sea.

"With a sea state of 20-plus seas and winds upwards of 40 to 50 knots, vessels and rigs like this do not ride that well," Vislay said in an interview with the Daily News this week. The pitching motion, he said, was severe.

Should the Coast Guard send its own crews into the storm to evacuate the 18 aboard the Kulluk? The decision to launch was made in Juneau. Back at Air Station Kodiak, Vislay, a 42-year-old pilot with more than 18 years in the Coast Guard, began directing air operations for the helicopters and C-130, a role he served throughout the evacuation. The Kulluk and the Aiviq were just 30 flying minutes away, he said, and that unusual proximity to base lessened the risk to the Coast Guard crewmen.

At 10:30 p.m. on Dec. 28, the Coast Guard launched two MH-60 helicopters, each carrying two pilots, a flight mechanic and a rescue swimmer, along with a C-130, whose crew would handle communications at the scene.

"For us, when you come over in a helicopter to hoist from something like that that is moving up and down, almost violently, it's an extreme hazard," Vislay said.

The evacuation plan was to hover a helicopter over the rig's helo deck, lower a basket and hoist the crew one by one, Vislay said. On a pitching rig, it's too dangerous to land.

The winds were pummeling. It was dark. Waves were crashing near the helo pad, the one open area. The emergency towline was connected to the rig near the pad, complicating the approach. The way the rig was positioned, the helicopters couldn't fly nose into the wind.

And at the rig's center was a swaying, 160-foot-tall derrick.

"It makes the hoist very challenging because you don't want to get hit by that tower," Vislay said.

Piping, rigging, beams, cranes and other Kulluk features made maneuvering extra challenging, he said.

The Coast Guard considered putting a rescue swimmer into the water and directing the Kulluk crew, in insulated survival suits, to jump in. That would have eliminated some hazards but created new ones, he said.

"As long as we can control the situation, we'll push to that point," Vislay said. The Kulluk's freeboard deck was so high up that jumping wouldn't have been safe, he said.

So the first evacuation effort was aborted. The Coast Guard monitored the situation through the night.

The next day, on Dec. 29, the Coast Guard tried again. By now, the Kulluk was under tow to two vessels, the Aiviq and another Shell-contracted vessel, the Nanuq. The rig was positioned so that the helicopters could approach at a safe angle. It was light.

"And we got lucky," Vislay said. "We were able to get in there a little closer."

By Saturday afternoon, the Coast Guard had lifted all 18 crew members off the Kulluk. It took a total of three trips in two helicopters.

Repeated efforts by the Daily News to interview the Kulluk crew have been unsuccessful

In briefings to reporters, officials with Shell and Noble have praised the Coast Guard for getting the crew off the rig.

"They were in good spirits," Vislay said. "They were very happy to be off. I think it was a rough ride."

The situation continued to worsen and tow lines kept breaking.

The afternoon of Dec. 31, the tow line to the Aiviq again broke. By then, the second towline was to the Alert, a powerful tugboat borrowed from its normal oil spill prevention duties in Prince William Sound. But the Alert's engines began experiencing problems and it couldn't hold the Kulluk alone. A command team in Anchorage ordered the Alert to let loose its tether so its crew wouldn't be in danger.

"We really hated to let her go. We hung onto it as long as we could," Alert crew member Mike Mueller of Homer said later when the tug docked in Kodiak.

At 8:48 p.m. on Dec. 31, the unmanned Kulluk grounded in what locals say is a rocky spot just off the shore of Sitkalidak Island, south of Kodiak.

Hi, cal! saw where there were winter weather advisories in the mountains north of you, but I guess they didn't make it that far south! Looks pretty warm there to me!

Hope you got your grout cleaning done! That sounds like work! :)

Cal, I thought of you and your son when I heard about the mishap off Kodiak Island. Hope everything is OK. I scanned back a little bit and didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

I'm crocheting a tablecloth for my niece's upcoming wedding (a present). I put a picture in sp's blog, so if you are interested in taking a look, go peek.

So that's how you clean grout? A toothbrush and baking soda? When we added on a master bed and bath to our place nearly 17 years ago, tile was 'the' thing to do in bathrooms . So our oversized shower is all tile, which I loved in the beginning, but am beginning to hate because of the grout. I scrub all the time, but I'm about ready to start digging some out!!! Some will just not come clean. I've used a toothbrush and Coment or Ajax to no avail. I don't really want to use bleach full strength, but that might be the only thing that does it!!

Back to work and school for most tomorrow, but I've got one more day off. Taking my mom to a doctors appt. in the AM, then hubby and I are headed to Disneyland as tomorrow is suppose to be a 'ghost town' according to a crowd tracking website I use . Only time will tell how accurate it is!

Did you get snow this time ? It was darn cold here!!!

Love your 'yote photos! They sure do make themselves at home, don't they?

I read (over on GG's blog, I think???) that the young coyote had suffered a broken leg, which managed to heal okay. I don't recall reading about that before. That is one lucky coyote to be doing okay. My little gray Gracie (cat) had to have her back leg amputated after breaking it.