Yep, it was one of those days. Actually yesterday was pretty close.
First off, yesterday we did go to the Men’s BB game…They lost but gave a good effort. They are just really depleted with two leaving and two injured they have a 6 or 7 man rotation and that was not enough in the end. Plus the offense just is not there for this team.
For today, it was a stay at home day. It is not because we partied into the night either. I hung in there until about 11:20… I saw the ball drop in NY and all the prep for locally in OKC but once you see one ball drop, do you really need to see another? I take this from reading The Reformed Broker “For no good reason, we place an artificial line between the prior year and the new year. Even the most confident analysts do not publish predictions for a year ahead in May. Yet, many analysts feel empowered to fire up their crystal balls in December and January.” – The same thinking applies to all parts of life, not just reading and dealing with analysts. Everyone, including me, has to come up with something special in hopes of having a better year next year than last. Well not everyone as some probably had a really good year last year… think the people that did win the lottery…
One of the The traditions here: Eat black-eyed peas, actually I think you are supposed to eat 365 of them nasty things for good luck. Maybe that is why I never have really good luck, I refuse to eat that many in one setting… in fact I do not like black-eyed peas… like my kids used to say about beans “they taste like dirt”… well I really like other types of beans but those peas are just nasty. Several others are listed in the link. Many I never heard of but some I may need to follow more closely? There are numerous things about eating on New Years for luck and The six major categories of Good Luck foods for New Year and they are grapes, greens, fish, pork, legumes (those damn peas) and cakes… 12 grapes at midnight (got mine a little early) but midnight in NYC should be ok?, Cooked greens, got some on the pizza we had before and after, Legumes – I ate some sweet pea pods with supper tonight but no black-eyed peas, that has to count right? Fish? well I missed that as I couldn’t’ find the can of sardines I thought we had, probably should have cooked up one of those tilapia fillets we had in the freezer but I am not hungry now, Cakes – somewhere we heard doughnuts were the ticket so we got some yesterday and I had a “cake” doughnut for breakfast – probably should have stuck with my oatmeal but that doughnut with sprinkles sure was good… You can check out the Lucky Foods page here.
Once I had finished up my “good luck” doughnut and ate some more grapes, I did little to nothing. I read some blog pages, did a little financial stuff and mostly sat on my tail… A little after noon I was informed that the weather web page was locked up at 3am… so I proceeded to do the January 1 maintenance on the weather station (the Oregon Scientific WR-968). I usually forget to do all that until some time in February after we have had rain or snow and I have to cheat the system to get it to show correctly but I got right on it today. When I got out to the shop to check it showed a lock on the sensors that one had a low battery and one was not coming in at all. That tends to lock it up if that one is one of the 3 critical ones (outside temp, inside temp with barometer, and possible channel 1 if I have it set to be the outside temp instead of the real one that is hanging under the ceiling of the back deck. I swap to channel 1 because the real outside shows about 5 degrees or more higher temp and 10 to 15% lower humidity than the one that is on the north side of the house in the shade and about 5 ft. from the ground (proper siting for it)… Once I saw that with the low battery it was time to do all the swaps before they caught me. So, I
1. replaced all the batteries in the collection monitor (found they were dead or low anyway and it had been running on the external power).
2. Swapped the battery in the indoor unit that showed low battery.
3. Reset channel 1 as I had replaced the battery in it 2 days ago and forgot to check all the monitor units that it was working with.
4. Reset the main monitor unit so it searched out all the remotes and they were all showing good batteries.
5. Then I had to reset the clock in the main monitor to be with the real time… it was off by 30 minutes due to a power down I suspect when the batteries were low..
6. I then also reset the “at Sea-level” barometer reading to match the rest of the units in my area (mostly the official one at the airport).
7. Fixed the software adjustments I had made last year for rain and other things.
8. Then I had to reset the monitor in the house that is not linked to the computer but picks up all the remote units for me to read with out going outside and as a double check.
Nothing is easy with some of this stuff but I think I have it all working and back on with out any “funny” adjustments to make it match up. I wish I could get the wind anemometer to a better location. It is always below actual wind speed due to it being blocked by trees on the west and North west, the roof of the house to the direct south and a hill to the east. I did put it up on the top of the “detached garage” that makes it about 25 ft. off the ground
The top of the door is 14ft. the pitch is about 6 ft. and the pole I put it on was 4 ft.
but the trees to the west are 50 ft. trees and only about 125 feet away so not much else I can do about that direction.
Once I got all that working and satisfied myself it was ok, I took a well deserved nap. First one I have had in about 6 weeks. I keep saying I am going to get my nap in but somehow I always get busy on something and it just doesn’t happen. Felt real good today.
That was about it for my day – the first day of this new year. Oh I did get on the air briefly, while working on the weather station, and listened to some PSK signals. Had one from South Africa (ZS6??? don’t remember it all now) on 15 meters that I wanted to work but he faded out when I had a few minutes… then later I see he was back but never got around to working that one. I also didn’t get back to the radio this evening like planned. Maybe tomorrow evening I will get fired up. I also need to get on my grounding project with the jeep radio and remove some of the noise on HF there but that is for another day. – WD0AJG