QST de N7GMT

OK, so recently I did the nigh-unthinkable: I bought an iPod.

I know, I know.

But it still has the best user experience of all the (stock*) MP3 players out there.

(*I hear you can put Linux on some of them and it can make ‘em that much better, but I’m not there yet.)

Sure, iTunes is a real pain for anyone with more than six braincells—well, more than six computer-savvy braincells. Sure, it uses an internal, non-user-replaceable battery. No, you can’t just mount it as a flash-drive and drop music on it and have it access them. (You can just use it as storage, but that seems like a bit of a waste of an 8GB iPod nano, which is what I got.)

But it’s tiny. And you can watch movies on it. Yes, the screen is small, and pixels are so small as to be nigh undetectable by the unaided human eye, but it’s pretty cool to be stuck somewhere, waiting for someone to show up so you can do whatever it is you’re there waiting for them for, and just whip out the ol’ iPod and watch the next ten minutes of whatever it was you were watching when life interrupted.

I got it right before taking off for the weekend with my boys for a fathers-and-sons outing …

(note to self, write about that, too)

… and only had time to throw on a few albums before heading out to the western Utah desert. (They don’t call it a desert for nothing, let me tell you.) I played with it a little while out there and a little when we got back before my Sweetie noticed and asked, “When did you get an iPod?”

I eventually had to let her try it out. She had it in her possession for all of—and I’m not making this up—exactly four seconds before asking “So, when are you going to get one?” Yeah, exactly.

So either I have an über-cool new toy, or I’ve finally sold out to the iPod generation. The jury is still out.

(Did I mention I got a “reconditioned” one, so it was, like, 30% off?  Does that make me less of a sell-out?)

[sung to the tune of "What do you do with a drunken sailor"]

What do you do with a pregger wi-ife,
What do you do with a pregger wi-ife,
What do you do with a pregger wi-ife,
Er-lie in the mornin’?

Aparently you take her to the horse-pittal and let her bring a “new one” into the world.

Yup. Our latest was bornified this week. Cute little guy.

We’re glad to have him with us. He was our biggest baby—something which did not please the one birthing him. She was quite glad to have him in her arms, though.

I sure do love her, my Sweetie. I don’t, however, know how she manages to do all the things she does. Trying to get all the kids off to school—fed, dressed, with brushed teeth and combed hair—and then to take care of all the other domestic things that need doing every day and every week … and then to top it off with all the other things she does, like being the Primary President for our Ward, making and selling hand-made soap from our home and at the Holy Cow Boutique, teaching piano lessons to the neighborhood kids, playing piano for our church choir … <sheesh!>

Anyway, he’s here now; healthy and happy (as long as he’s fed and no one is messing with his diaper).

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for letting us play host to this wee one.

We spent the weekend up at the in-laws. It was to be one of the last weeks of the open-house for the new LDS Temple in Rexburg (picture). The kids had an extra day off from school for Martin Luther King day, so it seemed like a good excuse to get out and visit family.

But there was a contest that weekend. Now, admittedly, I don’t normally make much of a fuss for Ham radio contests. I mean, I’m no contender, that’s for certain. But for some reason I decided that I was going to give it a go anyway. I couldn’t think of how I was going to get any kind of decent antenna up, and I certainly didn’t want to schlep my entire “shack” with.

With the hours-before-departure dwindling, I decided that I would take my modest collection of Hamstick-style antennas, my trusty Elecraft K2, and do my best. Oh, did I mention that Rexburg is about the coldest point in (habited) Idaho? I did take this into account as I prepared gear and clothing.

Shortly after the contest began, I bundled up and headed out to setup in the truck: trusty 12V gel-cell between my feet, K2 on my lap, 15-meter mobile whip whipping in the gentle Rexburg zephyr. After my feet started going numb from the cold, I decided that 15-meters needed some rest before I tried to find someone new. Well, lunch was calling, too. (Literally. My Sweetie called me on my cell to tell me they were eating. She wasn’t about to come out there in the cold to tell me, no sir.)

Tried to work a little 40-meter, but the band was just mish-mash from one end to the other. And no one could hear my pitiful 5W (yes, I was running frozen QRP on a mobile whip. Masochist, I know.) through the pile-ups.

Didn’t have a whip for 20-meters, but I brought along the trusty Radio Shack 102-inch stainless steel whip to see what I could do with it. I managed to get it to tune, with the help of the superb Elecraft T1 and made a surprising (to me) number of contacts.

Anyway, the total score was 20 total QSOs in 13 states (multiplier of 15 with three bands) for a grand score of 300 points. Pretty pathetic, score-wise, unless you take into account that it was QRP using a mobile whip, and I was freezing portions of my anatomy off—well, I would have been had I not taken precautions. (Hmm… seems to be pretty chilly here in the kitchen at, oh dear, 0320h local time). And if you scale my score to the 100W I would like to have been running, that would put me at 6,000 points, which isn’t at all bad. Maybe next year.

OK, so what if it’s the third of December; who’s counting? Other than my boy, of course. And my oldest daughter. It’s not like I promised I would put up the Christmas lights this weekend … <sigh> except that I did.

But it wasn’t my fault that we got four inches of snow. We never get snow in our part of town—well, almost never. If the benches and foothills get lots of snow, we’ll get a skiff. (That is indeed a word that can be applied to snow. It means “slightly more than a dusting” I think. Just ask Mark Eubank, the former weather man on KSL News.)

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I was reminded recently that there was an entry that wanted writing. Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend and the kids are in bed I might as well get it out of the way, eh? (Now if I were really on the ball, I would have a nice new laptop, with functional WiFi so I could sit in the living room with everyone else while I write this, but I’m an anti-MS curmudgeon, and it can be difficult to convince Linux and WiFi to behave themselves on old hardware.)

Anyway…

I read a post over at my mother’s site about men up on roofs. (Shouldn’t that be “rooves?” Oh wait, this is English; it’s not supposed to make sense.) No good deed goes unpunished, so I left a comment on her entry, which stirred up memories of a weekend not too far past.

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So this weekend was the ARRL Sweepstakes for SSB. Yes, terribly exciting, I know. I wasn’t sure I was going to have time to operate at all, because Saturday was looking really booked, what with The Holy Cow finishing up, and sneaking off to Salt Lake to pick up a new sofa I’d ordered to surprise my Sweetie with.

Anyway, with the two youngest under the weather, I had to stay home from church to watch ‘em. No radio time there. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble two little boys can get into if left to their own devices. (Well actually, I know of several of you who can, but that ruins the flow of the previous sentence, so let it slide, will ya?) And if you’re the only adult in the house, who do you think they come to when they want attention? Yeah, hard to guess that one, isn’t it.

After everyone else got home, had lunch and had settled into what I like to refer to as the Sunday Afternoon Fester I figured I could warm up the radio and see how many Qs I could pull off before someone noticed. I didn’t start until about one o’clock Sunday afternoon, and the contest was due to finish by eight that evening, local time. I was puttering along when I got a gentle prod from my DX-ing buddy, N7BAN; a text message “I heer u” [sic] and a response of “38″ when I asked how many Qs he had. Twice what I had at the time; time to kick it into gear … at least for a while.

I didn’t plan on getting in as many hours as I did, and probably would have knocked off early, but I got a special treat. My son, who has been kind-of interested in getting his license for some time, came over and sat down, watching me rack up a few points. I explained sections and multipliers, and we watched the score go cross 2,000 and continue to over 3,000. By then the excitement was building; he’s just a wee bit competitive. By the time I was over 5,000 points I could tell he was itching, so I had him share the headphones, handed him the mike, and showed him all the things he needed to say to complete an exchange. We got interrupted by dinner (bah, who needs food when there are Qs to be won?), and after dinner I set us up with a pair of head-phones each. That really got him going and helped us coordinate.
For those of you out there who slowed down, took special note, and gave precedence to a young voice answering to my call, Thank You! You really made his night, and mine. Seeing the light in his eyes as we “scored” an Alaska, or Hawaii, or Virginia station was worth it all to me. The last Q we had right before the contest went dark was with K7IR, up in Eastern Washington. Since the pressure was now off, we had a chance to have a quick chat. Turns out he has a son the same age, and complimented mine on doing a fine job with the exchange. Actually, several of you gave him compliments on his operating that brought out that goofy, snaggle-toothed grin of a young man caught between childhood and the age of teens. (Precious radio funds will soon have to be devoted to adjusting the worst of the snaggles. <sigh>)

To the 87 ops with whom I exchanged today, TNX es 73.

To those who gave special note to a gangly youth (and future ham radio op), VY TNX es 88 de N7GMT.

Well, we atoned for our day out, Friday; we schlepped the kids up to Swiss Days, and convinced my sister-in-law and her husband that they, too, wanted to experience Swiss Days. With a herd of kids.

I got to get my leather-bound book; we got to eat more <ahem> “Swiss” food; and the kids got to spend their September allowance on bags of marbles at the hand-made games booth (I don’t think any of them had the cash in their hands longer than twenty seconds, some literally two seconds—from my hand to theirs, to the booth-keeper’s). No one died; there were no kids lost in the making of the expedition (although two crashed and fell asleep towards the end); and some of the kids learned to bus surf on the way back to the parking lot.

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