As I walked around people were putting things together, cleaning things up, and testing gear out. Testing the JBD (jet blast deflector) was ABE AN Charles Jackson (below) from Sun Valley, CA. He said they did the maintenance yesterday and today are putting it through regular pre-operation test. "It's fast paced and it's exciting," he said about the flight deck. Other than being far away from his fiancée Yuki, he likes going to sea and working on the flight deck.

As I was hearing some sea stories from one of the Navy's saltiest Sailor, the Handler, he stopped to point out ABH1 Kurt Thomas Simpson (below) from Cedar Falls, Iowa who was celebrating his birthday out to sea for the sixth straight year, and all six on Indy. "Is it hard being out here? No way!" he said laughing. Simpson is the Flight Deck Control Leading Petty Officer responsible for 111 guys. He missed getting underway with Indy when she left San Diego for her new homeport in Yokosuka, Japan by five days, but once he caught up with her, he's been here since. "Yeah, I get off the ship when we're in port. I like what I do, but I like Port Calls too," he said with a wide grin and quick chuckle.

At around 5:40ish pm, that's 9:40ish am Eastern [I think], the sun pretty much sinks into the sea. It'll hover for just a bit before it races out of sight. When we're not flying, there's always guys coming out to check it out... hopefully I won't get too sidetracked to make it back up for the remaining sets to go.

I don't know exactly what they were serving back here, but this is a look at Indy's "Hard Rock Cafe" where Sailors enjoy the friendly ambience of music-artist' photos, Hard Rock T-shirts from throughout the world, music from a Juke Box and Number One Hit Albums wall hangings. Other mess deck themes include Sports and Movie Classic memorabilia.

LI2 James Dixon (photo right) from Thomaston, GA was there and printing one of the dozen or more projects they work on everyday. Dixon said they run through 10,000 sheets of paper a day to accomplish all the jobs brought to them. "Our last super-sized job we did was the decommissioning Information booklets for all the Sailors in Ship's Company, more than 2,000," Dixon said. "It was 150 pages and ran over 400,000 sheets of paper. We were working nearly 15 hours a day until we had that book done." Also down in Lithographers' world was NCCM (SW) Wilfred Cotto from New York, NY (left) and LI1 (AW) Douglas Shepherd from Covington, KY.

(Below) AMH2 Bill Chapman from Sunburg, OH was preparing to remove the arresting hook from this jet. He said after every 100 landings the hooks come off for a safety inspection. Chapman said his job is busy and he enjoys the work, but misses his son Billy when underway.

(Below) Out checking his guys was CMDR David Odenwelder, the Handler, (right) with one of his flight deck Chiefs, ABHC Paul Foster from Salt Lake City, UT. Even though the birds weren't flying, they still had to be moved around today. Odenwelder is in charge of Flight Deck Control, which is responsible for the wellbeing of everything on the flight deck... that's three acres of three billion different functions - give or take a two.

(Below) Wiping down the windshield of one of HS -14's helicopters was Airman Danny Huskins from Louisville, KT. "Depending on what day it is, or what hour, is how I decide whether I like being here or not," said Huskins who is a plane captain and works with launching and recovering the helo's. "I suppose if someone told me this is where I would be back in High School, I'd said 'anything is possible.'"

With the sun gone and dinner well in full swing on the mess decks, I made my way down to grab some grub before we manned our battle stations for General Quarters. Airman Alex Vasquez (below left) from Chicago, IL and Airman Victor Morales from New York, NY were keeping the line moving as they served up dinner. Vasquez is TAD from VF 154 and Morales is TAD from Weapons. They were serving in the Forward Galley, which is more "fast food" than the Aft Galley, which serves "traditional" meals, which means full courses.

While Indy's underway, we put out a ship's newspaper called The Declaration everyday. It covers ship's events, TV schedules, world news, sports, and miscellaneous trivia. Well, I went down to the print shop where the paper's printed each night to grab a photo of the guys who make it happen.

Well, tomorrow we begin flying again, there might not be a Notepad as we work on some web updates - Department pages and some motion graphics. Until then...