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Earle A. Griswold

1900 – 1986

He\’d have been 108 today, but I doubt he\’d have been happy about it. Living to 108 would have been far too ostentatious for his tastes.

To see if I can embed pictures from my Picasa account… Mrs Imaginarythreedimensionalblackboard.com and I went to the Cheshire Fair in New Hampshire this weekend.

CheshireFair

Oooops, I did it again

I screwed up my blog

Lost some of the files

And erased the log

(sung, of course, to the tune of \”Ooops, I did it again\”, heheh).

Somewhere in the database are the comments and pictures and oh-so-witty observations I\’ve made in the past several months, but in trying to upgrade the version of WordPress I\’ve been using, I erred. I have no idea what I did, and I\’m quite happy that I\’ve managed to recover the stuff that\’s actually here. That alone is a Christmas Miracle.

So, forget about the past few months. I have. I don\’t at all know what I posted, except that I went to Historic Deerfield, Mystic Seaport a couple of times, the New England Air Museum, and NEAR-fest, which has to do with Amateur Radio. One of the trips to Mystic was for the Wooden Boat Show, which was just awesome. Nothing like a wooden boat.

But going forward, I\’ll hopefully have new stuff to blog about, and I\’ll be much more careful about backing stuff up. Oh, that\’s a crucial, crucial step.

Thanks

If you\’ve read any of my posts at all, you are probably aware that I am an Amateur Radio operator. One of the activities within the hobby that I pursue, on occasion, is contesting, where I try to contact as many other operators in the contest as I can, and we compete with one another on how many folks we contact.

A contest last spring was the New England QSO Party (a QSO is a confirmed two-way radio conversation between operators).

I got a certificate (\”wallpaper\” in the hobby, because some of us are prone to cover our walls with such cherished proof of our radio prowess) today indicating that I had managed to break into the top five operators in the low-power (100 watts or less) category. In my county. I checked the results list. There were six operators from my county who participated. So I was also next-to-last.

To set the scale, I managed to contact 40 different people, in 20 different locales ( the locales count as multipliers – the number of people times the number of locales gives your score), so I had a score of 800. The first place finisher is a 13-year-old fellow (he\’s not a kid – he\’s a peer because he is an Amateur Radio operator like me) a few towns over. He took it a bit more seriously than I did, and accumulated 321 QSOs over 53 locales, for a score of 17,013!

But I got wallpaper!

(As an aside, further research indicates that in 2005, when I was KB1HDO, I got wallpaper for 6th place finish in Middlesex County… Yes, my prowess as an Amateur Radio operator continues to improve…)

Well, you\’ll have to make up your own minds whether it\’s really \”normal\” or not, but we had the \”tree guys\” in to take care of the two trees that fell in the windstorm a few weeks back, fell the one remaining dead tree that didn\’t fall, and trim up the oak between Philip\’s lot and ours. That oak had a branch rubbing up against the house (I swear it wasn\’t last year!) and was going to start doing some damage soon.

Peg took photos of the guys at work (Flagg Tree Services, if you live in North Central Massachusetts and need some tree work done). She\’s convinced we need a tree chipper (of course, she\’s quite convinced that she needs a Sawzall, too), and I think she got a ride in the bucket truck! Of course, I had to stay at work to pay for all of this frivolity, but I\’d probably have fallen into the chipper myself, and I don\’t have enough insurance to leave behind a rich widow (entirely by design. She has no real good reason to do me in…)

Now, the \”normal\” part – my antennas are back up! Yay! Now I can get back \”on the air\”.

Thanks, Nippy

I guess the local folks were calling the winds \”gusty\” to perhaps 41MPH or so, but I think it was windier than that. In any event, a couple of trees came down at the old hacienda here,

5

but luckily with little damage. Unfortunately I can\’t say \”no damage\”. Some siding was dented (aluminum…) and some edging was ripped loose and bangs around a bit in the wind.

The worst casualties, though were two of my HF antennas (the \”big ones\” that I use to communicate to places like Asiatic Russia, Australia, and other far-away places. The 40-meter \”horizontal loop\” antenna, essentially a 140-foot loop of copper wire strung around the house at about 35 feet was supported on one corner by one of the fallen trees. A good bit of luck is that the Dacron line holding the antenna was weaker than the antenna wire, so the antenna itself is intact – just not up at 35 feet where it\’s supposed to be. The 80-meter \”dipole\” antenna, which used to run along the edge of the lot, where the trees were, fell victim to the tree as well. Neither the copper wire nor the Dacron supporting rope parted, though, but the Dacron was pulled pretty tight, and I had to cut it – there was no way to untie it!

Another stroke of luck is that the second tree was long enough, and still sturdy enough, that it managed to support its Lose Weight Exercise and not tear down the telephone and cable TV lines. We could probably have gotten by without the cable TV for a couple of days, but the telephone line brings DSL, the lifeblood of our email – not to mention the Internet link for my Packet Radio BBS. I managed to cut through that tree trunk (only about 4\” thick at that point) with my pole saw, preventing further damage if the tree were to break more.

I do need to get a \”tree guy\” out here to cut up the rest of the mess, and take down the remaining dead tree. It\’s going to fall down soon, and I won\’t, very likely, be this lucky next time!

One from Avery, one from Jack:

(look carefully at the one on the right from Jack – it says \”Jack to John\” but it\’s in red, on red. Kind of hard to read 😉 )

HEMA is a Dutch company with 150 or so stores across Benelux and Germany. They have a \”diversions\” page that is a complete blast! (It\’s not their home page, and you can\’t order anything, but it\’s a lot of fun!)

Check it out

I just got this email (to my ham radio account, which isn\’t used for anything personal or financial…). It wasn\’t even addressed to me specifically, contains a misspelled word or two, and the punctuation is terrible. Oh, I\’m sure this must have really come from PayPal – as if I\’ve never seen one of their emails (sent to the only account I have associated with PayPal). Wow. This guy must be really stupid. I tried to do a reverse-lookup of his number, but he\’s at least smart enough to keep his information unlisted. I did forward this email to his phone provider, though. I bet they know who he is. Maybe they can have a little talk with him.

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