I Love, and Hate, this picture.

I Love it because, well, LOOK at that. All those worlds! All those People! All the exploring that can be done! A Trillion lifetimes wouldn’t be enough at Warp Speed. Which is why I hate it. I’m old and we haven’t even managed to make a place to live on our one Moon. The closest I’ve been to this grandeur is, what, 15-18 miles? (That was a special ride in an of itself but I was a whole generation younger.)

And, honestly, sometimes I hate having to drive the 3 miles into town for something. But I’d make this trip! To me, the perfect “Heaven” would be for my consciousness (the essential ME) to be able to travel to these distant places and observe. Just look. Forever.

Oh, Hey. It sprinkled some today. Never thought you’d hear this from me, but, Yay. We really need some rain for a couple of days. Heavy sprinkles would do. We couldn’t handle really heavy rain right now. No, that would be a bad thing for awhile.

MCARC meeting went well this morning. They really don’t know what to think of me cause I will not let them run the meeting or BS for more than a minute or so before dragging them back on track. And I’m not afraid to call them on their “suggestions” about what the club should do; you can get lots of ideas, but no one will volunteer to actually do anything. Hell, you can’t even get most of them to do Field Day anymore.

But I did tap a couple of the younger (new) members to be the Public Information Officer(s), since that seemed to be the biggie this month. I’d love to have classes after the business meeting; but no one will volunteer to give any. So, what does one do? I just don’t know. It’s a fine balancing act between being too pushy and just letting them do what they’ve been doing these past 4-5 years. Which is a lot of talk.

SWMBO took me to a new (to me) Teriyaki Chicken place in Bremerton (which has been there longer than I can remember). Was good. Then we spent too much money at WinCo; but the only “extra” thing I got was a cast iron cornbread pan.

Also made a short stop by the Vape Shop for some new atomizers. That’s spendy. That new Invader Mini I got has been giving me all kinds of errors for a few days. Thought changing the atomizer would help. Did, but still got the same errors. Wound up taking the thing completely apart and putting it back together one piece at a time. That seemed to help.

Say what you want about Vaping; I haven’t had a regular (analog) cigarette in over three years. And even though, cumulatively it looks expensive, I’ve saved over 2/3 of what I would have spent on smokes. And I would have.

Anywho, picked up an old Icom 2000H for $100 to use as a base station so I can monitor our repeater (since one of the major complaints is that nobody ever uses our repeater except for our Nets). It works great and I’ve already learned how to program it and have programmed in all the repeaters I can clearly hit. Added some Fire, Sheriff, Ambulance, and even Seatac Approach. Mounted it underneath the box thingie my 857d sits on and it looks like it belongs there.

And now I can do PSK31 (or whatever) on 20-meters (or wherever) and still monitor our repeater. I’m beginning to understand why Hams have multiple radios. Now to save up for a new laptop. (Hopefully one with more than 3 USB ports!)