Normal day here, but the wind didn’t blow, so guess that makes it an ab-e-normal day? not often we get days when the wind only blows a little bit but it sure was nice… Got out and had my 3+ mile walk in this morning… same old trail but came on some changes along the way… Cottonwood trees are in full cotton right now… and there are many at the Country Club golf course so the sidewalk on the south side was decorated with the cotton this morning…
There was a lot in the air but my phone camera doesn’t do as well and I didn’t grab the other camera today…
Once I had the walk in and got back I got started on my little welding project… I had figured I would get to it earlier but had some delays in things so today was the day for welding… got all the pieces out and made a few cuts and trimmed some then started setting clamps to get it welded up… Got the first pieces tacked good and checked it for square and setup…
Surprising for me, it was pretty square, even if the ground and other stuff around were not square it meshed up ok… My welding is not real good anymore. A big lack of practice since I only weld maybe once every year or two on small stuff. Back on the farm I got fairly good at welding cause I had to fix all the stuff I broke… so the outcome was… I broke a lot of stuff and had a lot of practice… ? Well not really but we did have a lot of practice and we took shop back then in school for FFA activities so welding was one of the items we had to learn how to do good enough to make things hold… mine will hold, most of the time, but it never looks real good… sure appreciate that we now have the small portable grinders to smooth it out… ha!
I got most of it done to this point then took off to ship out another package with the Heathkit test tool to a collector in Tulsa… got that all done before noon and picked up Sherrie for lunch… another one of those we can’t decide so we picked a coupon for Mazzio’s (you can eat salad there too) and had that for lunch… I picked up some primer paint at Wal-Mart and then finished up the welding and fixing of all the joints for this small project and brushed it down … got most of the rust off or at least down to a point of being able to paint…
Don’t look like much here but hopefully it will hold the tower up when I let down to work on it… I can take it down when ever as it is just clamped to the guy post and the pad on the far end has some spikes into the ground to keep it from moving… will be a lot more solid than the old wooden sawhorse I used before… it collapsed!… And this is painted to match and much smaller and out of the way so now I need another calm day to test it out… let the tower down and do a few antenna changes… I may have to do that in several attempts cause I have a lot of swapping to do and need to run some new coax up the tower… several things are on the antenna improvement project list…
Dinner tonight consisted of …. a Braums double dip turtle sundae… we split that, although I am sure it ruined all the workout activity Sherrie and I did today, but we didn’t have anything else so maybe it evens out?
During my little project I grabbed the channel iron and squeeze to hold it and felt a strain but didn’t think much about that… but tonight noticed what I had done… guess I broke another blood vessel… seems when you get older they become more vulnerable to such things…
At least now it is not as bad as a few months ago… I had to stop taking the daily aspirin cause I would bleed at any little stick… and it wouldn’t quit with out a bit of pressure… another problem of getting older and the blood pressure meds I was taking… but the Doctor reduced some of them and I have cut the aspirin and it is a lot better now and my pressure is holding pretty good… might be that I am not traveling so much either and I know that helps cause I can get on a regular exercise and get out and do things that keep stress low and life is easier… Just need to pace my projects out instead of thinking I have to rush through them … like before…
That was my day… not much radio time today… had it on but didn’t do any contacts… I even got all my tools and equipment put up tonight … that is unusual for my projects… putting things away… sure like the feel of that…
The dog is still hiding under the blankets, the cat is still grabbing the dog crate every chance for her napping, so I guess things are about normal for now…
WD0AJG