Doing what I do best seems to be "sitting at the airport and waiting for my flight".
Albuquerque airport is quite small, so there is no American Airlines lounge here. I am forced to mix in with the confused genpop crowds. If you spend enough time at the airport, you can quickly tell apart frequent rtavellers like me who can navigate the mess of any airport with our eyes closed, from the normal people. Most TSA agents here know be by sight, I think, while the sane people all have mildly bewildered look after this rare encounter with what passes for airport security. I envy them a little. I would rather be home.
This also happens to be the tail end of the yearly balloon fiesta and many people are heading out. In other words, the ratio of the bewildered to the seasoned travellers who leisurely stroll through the airport knowing exactly where and when they need to be is unusually high.
My annoyance with constant travel aside, this trip is more interesting than most. I am heading over to Washington DC for the yearly Association of the US Army expo. It is a massive event and it provides all sorts of clues about the direction the Army thinks the technology is heading. A lot of the stuff is standard, but with a couple of massive armed conflicts out there, a lot of the "lessons learned form other people dying" are bound to filter through.
The hottest of hot topics for a while has been drone warfare, both how to use drones best and how to counter them.
We are rapidly getting better at both, but there is still a lot of room for improvements. Israelis are arguably the best at it (they've had lots of practice), but a Hizballah drone did manage to sneak through their defense earlier today and injure 60+ people in Jerusalem. It is a problem. We are much better in intercepting long range missiles than the slow moving drones.
Now that I think about it, if there is interest, I can probably do a "off topic" livestream of sorts and discuss it. From a technology standpoint, whatever Israelis learn in the course of the Middle Eastern adventures is rapidly shared with the US military, so we should see some interesting new things next week.
On a more personal note, a good friend of mine who escaped California roughly same time as I did lives in Northern Virginia. He has recently acquired his first AR, so I am planning to meet with him during one of the evenings and see if we can make some small, but meaningful improvements: better grip, different sling and an appropriate optic. Since I have been spending so much time with 1x prismatics lately, I think I'll set him up with the Swampfox Raider. It should work well for his purposes.
Ideally, I might try to do a livestream on Tuesday night, but we have other people from both US and Israel coming to the AUSA show, so my schedule might be a little busy.
If you are interested in some coverage of what I saw at AUSA, etc, I'll find a way to make it happen.
Alternatively, I could go back and do a riflescope Q&A, since there is a quite a lot I have been looking at recently.
Vote in the poll.
