What are you doing today?

Antenna transformer box.jpg

I recently decided to get back into amateur radio (aka ham radio) after a loooong hiatus. I’ve been licensed since high school but haven’t been active (other than for a brief period a decade ago) since my early 20s.

First order of business is putting up a simple wire antenna. I went with what’s called an end-fed half wave dipole. Yesterday I made the matching network winding a transformer on three ferrite cores. Today I put the transformer and connectors inside a water-tight box, which will eventually get connected to the 134’ wire antenna, a ground rod, and to my radio through a length of coax.

If everything goes well, I should be on the air within a week.
 
DT said:
It's showtime!

Daughter has the big show tonight, she's in theater, does all the tech stuff, stage management, costumes, set design, hahaha, even standing in for a few acts to supplement the cast. It's a pretty major production, there's like 50 kids in the theater "club" (she's also taking it as an elective).

I suspect lots of running back and forth to the school this afternoon :D
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It was terrific, the kids did an amazing job, and there were 39 in this production (that's a lot of roles, costumes and management). Really fun play, neat deconstruction of the prince-slays-the-monster tropes, and plenty of laugh out loud moments (clearly he's a fan of Monty Python):


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When Princess Alessandra’s father the king offers her hand in marriage to the knight who can slay the evil bog witch and lift the curse, there’s only one thing for the princess to do: Sneak out of the castle and kill the witch herself to avoid marriage. But she’s not dumb and she’s not going alone, because she’s first assembling a crack crew of the deadliest monsters in myth and legend to help. But she discovers the monsters aren’t what they seem, and neither is the witch, or the curse, or the kingdom. A rollicking and wild quest of magic and adventure. (If you loved She Kills Monsters, read this play immediately.)


This author is really terrific a friend (who is also a playwright / theater teacher), performed another one by him called - How to Survive Being in a Shakespeare Play - hahaha, which has a hysterical description:

Some day it’s going to happen: You’re going to find yourself on stage, wearing tights, and saying things in iambic pentameter. Face it, you’re in a Shakespeare play, and that means it’s a pretty good bet you’re going to DIE. The Bard is out for blood, but this play is here to stop him! How could Romeo and Juliet survive? Julius Caesar? A nameless soldier in Henry the Fifth? What if King Lear had an emotional support llama and didn’t need to make terrible mistakes? Join us in discovering how a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays could’ve turned out differently! If only they listened…
 
Apple fanboy said:
Moving is fine. Bending not so much fun.
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When anyone mentions lifting stone and gardening in the same breath, I flash back to the time when there was some leftover bank run type of stone piled on the lawn near the end of one of my driveways after some repairs at road edge, and I thought to move the stones back to a spot near my barn and just rake the silty part of the material into the driveway and the lawn, as it would settle with a rain. I fancied the stones themselves would be perfect for drainage at the bottom of large crockery I liked to use for geraniums put here and there around the place in summer.

Well I began picking the stone into a five-gallon bucket and when it got like half full I'd pop it into my garden cart and wheel it back to where I wanted it. The afternoon wore on and I was about done. but there were maybe two of my desired-weight loads left. I was tired of the whole project really, and it was so tempting to just get it over with already.

So I piled half of what there was into the bucket as usual, and then looked and figured well what the hell. I can fit the rest in there, and it's not like I actually have to carry it, just pick it up stick it on the cart. One and done, instead of two trips! So I recklessly piled the whole lot of what was left in there and then gave the bucket a massive pickup effort... almost dislocated my shoulder! I could feel something almost ripping in there...

Huh, okay... so I set it down of course and unloaded more than half of it and picked that up with the other hand, toted the cart back and then stashed that in the barn and called it a day. Next day went out and got that last batch of rocks, still using the other hand, because I could feel that shoulder suggesting "go ahead, I dare ya".

I didn't so much as pick up a bag of flour or cat litter with that arm for about a month. Never tried to rush a job like that again after such a close call. And yeah my back was tired too from using a garden cart instead of a wheelbarrow. Haste makes waste! The barrow was in the back of the barn and I was too lazy to go an extra 20 feet to fetch it when the cart was right there by the door...
 
lizkat said:
When anyone mentions lifting stone and gardening in the same breath, I flash back to the time when there was some leftover bank run type of stone piled on the lawn near the end of one of my driveways after some repairs at road edge, and I thought to move the stones back to a spot near my barn and just rake the silty part of the material into the driveway and the lawn, as it would settle with a rain. I fancied the stones themselves would be perfect for drainage at the bottom of large crockery I liked to use for geraniums put here and there around the place in summer.

Well I began picking the stone into a five-gallon bucket and when it got like half full I'd pop it into my garden cart and wheel it back to where I wanted it. The afternoon wore on and I was about done. but there were maybe two of my desired-weight loads left. I was tired of the whole project really, and it was so tempting to just get it over with already.

So I piled half of what there was into the bucket as usual, and then looked and figured well what the hell. I can fit the rest in there, and it's not like I actually have to carry it, just pick it up stick it on the cart. One and done, instead of two trips! So I recklessly piled the whole lot of what was left in there and then gave the bucket a massive pickup effort... almost dislocated my shoulder! I could feel something almost ripping in there...

Huh, okay... so I set it down of course and unloaded more than half of it and picked that up with the other hand, toted the cart back and then stashed that in the barn and called it a day. Next day went out and got that last batch of rocks, still using the other hand, because I could feel that shoulder suggesting "go ahead, I dare ya".

I didn't so much as pick up a bag of flour or cat litter with that arm for about a month. Never tried to rush a job like that again after such a close call. And yeah my back was tired too from using a garden cart instead of a wheelbarrow. Haste makes waste! The barrow was in the back of the barn and I was too lazy to go an extra 20 feet to fetch it when the cart was right there by the door...
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Its not that bad. I've certainly done myself more injuries in the past. But as I get older I am getting a little wiser and do tend to stop earlier than I once would.
I recall laying out a car park for a local charity in my 20's. We used railway sleepers. The full size ones. I remember just hoping them on my shoulder and carrying them whilst the other volunteers picked them up with a person at each end.

These day's I'd struggle to do that!
 
Writing a tcsh script to run a bunch of MP4’s through ffmpeg to strip out the ac3 tracks and replace them with aac so my mac is happy with them…
 
my wife since she cant work yet got to fly a few hundred miles to visit her mom. well the fight back tomorrow got canceled because pilots on strike. glad she took a couple extra days of pills. her parents have always been on the right since most are in eastern Oregon. but many they listen to my pillow guy and MTG and trump now. their news sources are limited and even if they watch regular news they seem to not see what trump has done it just gets ignored.
 
Assembling more Ikea furniture!

And yes, this is the project I started over a week ago ... :ROFLMAO:
 
DT said:
Assembling more Ikea furniture!

And yes, this is the project I started over a week ago ... :ROFLMAO:
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Sounds like fun. Did a small amount of gardening. Run to the tip. Got some cash for Mrs AFB. Filled my tyre with air.
With write some reports for work later.
Also had a walk.
 
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