Ok. Let’s Get Caught Up A Bit!

Ok, what the heck has been going on? Well, I’ll tell you! I’ve been busy. I seem to be really busy for a “retired” guy! SWMBO ordered 100 cinder blocks and I had to make a flat area to put in a couple of raised bed gardens. That took a few days. Then she ordered “special” compost/dirt for them and I had to get that in. She got out and planted what she wants to grow. I had some cinder blocks left over so I made a small raised bed garden and planted some tomatoes and Bell Peppers in it. I keep it covered with plastic to keep the deer off the plants. Seems they’ll eat anything left out!
My youngest daughter and her kids (our grandkids!) have come over a couple of times on Saturday’s for dinner and such. They all loved working the digger! Lexi (13?) really went to town digging holes and filling them back in and pushing dirt and such. She seemed to have a ball! And she seems to have a knack for it.
Radio stuff is going okay. Re-built my dipole and added coax instead of the 300 ohm tv line. I was getting way too much RF back into the shack. It worked pretty good with me getting all over the USA. Then I switched the transmitting side from the western side of the house to the eastern. Now I get different places but still cover a lot of area. Yesterday I raised the transmitting end to near horizontal and didn’t seem to be getting out very well; but made a contact in Georgia that led to a contact in Australia! Too Cool! Me & VK4JD talked a good 20 minutes or so. I’ve been having WAY too much fun on the radio. I do mostly PSK31 and sometimes use EasyPal to send/receive pictures. Lots of fun!!!
Today a friend and I used his slingshot thingie to shoot some rope up a tall tree and ran about 250 feet of wire up for a longwire antenna. Was fun but frustrating when it didn’t work right. I can get the antenna tuned but get a lot of SWR so I think I’ll need to add a balun to it. I’ll experiment and see where it leads us.
Let’s see. What else.
Oh, we got a pretty good tax refund so SWMBO let my buy a round-trip ticket for the Hollie Family Reunion this year. All set up and ready to go. I think it’ll be fun.
Bought something called a "SuperPad" on Amazon.com. It’s like a cheaper version of the i-pad or Xoom. I bought it mostly to play with but am now doing e-mail and reading the news at new.yahoo.com. I also got it to replace my Zune. I like the Zune but the screen is too small for these old eyes now; so the SuperPad has a 10.2" screen I can watch video on while I’m waiting to fall asleep. It has an e-reader also that takes .txt files and shows them in book form (turning pages and everything!) and that’s been fun to play with. But who has time to read anymore? Still, this SuperPad will be fun to take on the trip to Greenville, Mississippi for the reunion. I’ll still have to take my video camera along…
Not much else going on around here. Everyday I seem to have a lot to do. I’ve gotten way behind in my favorite tv shows but managed to download and watch the final Smallville. I thought they did an excellent job and I was sorry to see the series end just as it was getting so good. Ah well.
I know I haven’t been posting much lately. I promise to do better.


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