One of my best friends, Andy Constant, is one of the top tugboat skippers in the Pacific Northwest. Here he is last August, at the helm of the Crowley tractor tug Guard, in Anacortes, site of the Cherry Point Refinery and Terminal, where a lot of our crude oil from Alaska is turned into petroleum products. He was giving my family a tour of the boat.I can't believe how much technology has changed the bridge of a tugboat since I worked for Crowley in the early 1980s.
Andy and I both worked for the City of Whittier when I ran the Whittier Small Boat Harbor back in the late 1970s. He used to kid me when I bragged about some of the plans I was implementing there. Like gender-neutral job descriptions (that's right, there were very few in the marina and public safety fields back then), the first 24/7 on-call full-EMT search-and-rescue unit on Prince William Sound, customer rate reductions averaging 15% per year during the highest inflation in the U.S. since World War II. And harbor expansion.
Andy said then he was going to design me an "ego-powered self-back-patting machine."
Well I need it now. I just did something I'd promised to do after the Voice of the Times had been interactive for awhile. I checked. Here it is:
Last 15 posts:
Voice of the Times - 10 comments
Progressive Alaska - 36 comments.
I'm going out on the frozen lake to do the Snoopy Dance, folks!
Update:
Kodiak Konfidential - 67 comments!
eat your heart out, VOT...
5 comments:
Thanks for the shout out, Philip.
I only know one person who reads the VOT, and it's part of his job as a politician's aide to scan all the opinion pages out there.
Hopefully he's reading Progressive Alaska.
I know from phone calls I've gotten that Don Young's office does. Seems like the only way I can get to them, Ish.
merry xmass Phil, Tell Andy I said hello...
So, I take it the self-back-patting machine was never built, so you still have to do it yourself? :) What office are you running for?
steve,
I'm running for the most troublesome character, getting in the face of the powerful and smug, in these parts in years. My local heroes have always been others who do that well.
Post a Comment