Cold weather = return to computers!

Hello world - and apologies for the general lack of updates here in, well, months.  Things have been quite busy for the NHS team this year, with something always seeming to come up and get in the way of 'ops normal'.  Nevertheless, in the past few weeks - and despite the holiday! - we're starting to get back to business.  As the cold weather begins to set in, more and more of our volunteers are returning and our office is beginning to hum again.  And not a moment too soon - our inboxes are full of demands for information.

So here we are - November 2012 coming to a close and here's what we've been up to:

HORNET - we're still hard at work here.  The Summer of 2012 proved to be our busiest season of meetings ever.  But after significant interest and some impressively high-level discussions we have reached something of a relative standstill in terms of funding.  As it turns out, the kind of capital we've been working to secure for the project is rather hard to come by these days.  This does not mean we're giving up - far from it - just kicking our start date further down the pike.  A disappointment, I know.  But we haven't exactly returned to you with nothing to show for our stellar year of pitching - I'll save the biggest announcements for our also-neglected newsletter, but suffice it to say that we're going to be unveiling something on the scale of Mini-HORNET (our 1:12 scale mock-up) quite soon.  We've also added several new members to the Project Team.

THE PENNANT - I know how you all so loved the weekly trivia, so we're bringing our flagship weekly publication back in the first week of December to make some of the big announcements for the Hornet Project and bring everyone up to speed on the biggest stories of the past year.  So if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, visit our website and enter your email address soon.  For those who have signed up but not received anything - you'll start getting them December 3rd.

THE DOCKYARD - By far our biggest hit this year was sustained by the Dockyard facilities in Norfolk VA.  Our Deep Creek Annex has been humming on and off, and our giant Hornet demo model has migrated there.  But the Norfolk shop has been largely closed this year - a function of many of our active-duty volunteers being reassigned to move on to bigger and better things.  The Monomoy Pulling Boats are all perfectly preserved, exactly where we left off, ready to re-start operations as soon as our capabilities permit.

I'm also preempting the New Year and making a resolution to begin making more regular updates here.  After all, there is plenty to talk about these days.  So standby in the coming days - yes, I'm THAT ambitious - it's time to kick this pig!

NNNN