Sonic Booms, Man Girdles, & the "Ground Zero Mosque"

I know this sounds like it's going to be oddly random, but stick with me people. This will probably be a short post tonight as I'm suffering from a slight sushi induced coma. lol  . . .  So I was wondering what to post about tonight and it was a three way toss up between all of the items you see here in the title. The winner? Sonic Booms! As this is the one menu item that happened to me here locally and it scared the ever lovin' piss out of me. We'll touch on the other two topics at a later time.

So here I am at home today getting ready to go see "Inception" (my movie comment to follow) when all of a sudden I hear what sounds like some kind of explosion and my entire townhouse shook! Then about twenty seconds later, another equally as loud and earth shaking boom goes off. At first I swore it was my neighbors, thinking maybe they had dropped something really big and heavy, but for it to shake the whole building . . well let's just say they would have had to have dropped a grown elephant in their bedroom. I checked outside to see if anything was amiss and saw nothing. So off I went to the movie hoping that nothing had actually exploded next door and that I wasn't going to come home to two crispy fried kitty cats.

After returning home and checking my Facebook I found out what exactly had happened and it's pretty crazy. Apparently it was a "float plane" that had entered restricted presidential air space over Western Washington while President Barack Obama was in town. The big O was in town, only minutes away and I knew nothing of it! I swear I'm always the last to know about these things. So it was two F-15 fighter jets that had been scrambled out of the Portland airport that had triggered the sonic booms. Why they came from Portland is a mystery to me considering we have more than a few military bases here locally. So this poor pilot and passenger had no idea that they had entered restricted airspace and after landing in Lake Washington they were greeted by the Secret Service. Oops!

For those of you that don't know the Pac NW lingo, a "float plane" is a sea plane like this:

Now, I've met a President (Clinton) and I've also had the opportunity to actually work with the Secret Service for the protection of a former Vice President, (told you I was a Jill of all trades) and I can tell you . . . they don't fuck around! The LAST thing you want to see getting off of a plane is a group of men in black suits, sunglasses, and earpieces coming for you. Yeah, they really do look like the Men in Black. Eventually they let the pair go, but this incident not only scared the crap out of the majority of residents throughout the region but it also knocked out 911 emergency services for an hour. So the moral of the story here kids is if you're a pilot, make sure you have clearance to fly. Poor guy.

That's it for tonight!
-Gwen-

P.S. "Inception" BLEW MY MIND! Great movie but you better be prepared to exercise some of those neurons to keep up.