For me, I hit the hobby shop. Not the one in town but mine. I have my own little place with my Ham Radio’s, work bench to tinker on, table with my popcan airplane stuff and if I get really needy, I can do some stained glass. Problem with the glass is it is on the bottom and I have not gotten to it, but really need to.
For the past 5 days, since getting snowed in I have been hitting the radioactive hobby. Making some contacts, learning a few things, and generally having fun. I could do this a lot more but time seems to get away, with all the other things we have to do. When it is warm, there is always too much yard work and stuff to do outside. So winter is a great time for me to get active again and work out some of my radio kinks. I haven’t worked as many forgein stations an last year, but did ok. Worked in contacts with Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba and the Canary Islands. I sure wish I had moved faster last fall and gotten up some other antennas I want to use. Bot are still here in the shop waiting on me to get my rear in gear and put them up. Even with the lesser antenna up, I did make a lot of US contacts and had some interesting QSO’s. For those interested my log of the last 30 contacts can be seen here. A more full list of my recent contacts can be found at:
I am not a super active guy like some of the other big guns. I just do it more for fun but did practice a little in the EPC-BPSK63 contest. Mostly trying to figure out how and make my contacts short as I tend to get long winded in some of them and for a contest they want to be in and out and move on. The goal is to make as many contacts as you can so they do not want to waste time with an old “RAG-CHEWER” like me. But I made 5 in the contest and figured out how to run my software to be short and efficient and put in all the necessary stuff. I may hit one of the next contests a little harder to see if I can do it.
We have also gotten out and made all of the sporting events here for OSU, including the FREE Wednesday night game that they won against Missouri. I have been to Some boring wrestling matches (the opponents were really over matched as far as a dual meet goes but some had good competition at particular weights. The Men’s BB team won two big ones and the Girls got clobbered by Baylor today. Not everything goes well but how do you play the Number 1 team in the US and make it look like you are in the same league? It was still good to go.
Most of the stuff around here has been shut down from Tuesday through Thursday. Tuesday it was not a good idea to even try to get out, with the blizzard and all. Wednesday, the roads were near impassable. You could get out with 4X4 but even they had problems in a lot of spots. Friday it was a fools paradise. Everyone having been cooped up for so many days had to get out. The fools were everywhere. The roads had not all been cleared and many were marginal for regular cars and boy did we see a bunch of things on Friday.
Case in point, We went out for lunch as usual with the ladies and on the way back we came to a corner on one of the inside streets. A lady in a Lincoln was out and should have stayed home. I guess someone had told here that when her tires slip to let off the gas so all she did was set. She got in the middle of the intersection and it was a slight hill, on the snow, she was going no where. She would get started moving then turn her front wheel sand it would stop moving and she would let off the gas and it would just set and spin, in slow motion. Several people tried to help her to get out of the way, but it was not going well. We finally convinced here to just put a lot more speed in the rear wheels when we got here started and keep moving no matter. We got here out of that intersection and as we got back in our vehicle and looked up the street she was hung in the next one. Like I said, some people should stay home or call in for what they need and have it delivered.
Well, today most of the snow is melting away and most of the roads are drying and clearing so maybe we will be ok for a day or more. They are predicting some more snow but at this time of year it probably will not be anything great that will shut it all down like the last one. I got some contacts in this morning early, then a few more after the Girls game. I also got out and shoveled some of the snow, to clear the sidewalk and front porch that had a huge drift blown in on it. It looked like a good idea to move all that snow to the water fountain we put in last fall. Speaking of that it is on a timer and runs twice a day, we just never shut it off. I noticed several days that the bird have found when it runs in the morning and plenty of them (mostly the blue birds) are taking advantage of the running water to quench their need when it was so cold that everything else was froze solid. When I went to shovel the snow it has some interesting character to the fountain. it had run enough to ide some of the snow that had piled on it and left this curl on the front side:
It is hard to see with all being white but it appears to have set the rock in a bowl of ice or snow…
And that is how it went – today! – WD0AJG