Sunday, March 23, 2014

Is It The Weather Why I Feel Half Dead?

     Maybe it was doing yard work, etc. yesterday while watching to make sure the TelCo installer didn't snag himself on my ham antennas or come to grief on the two power drops (house and garage) the phone line threads between.  (Yes, he knows his job and is unlikely to come to harm.  But wouldn't you feel like a prime chump to be sitting indoors with the music turned up while a guy strangled or fried in the back yard?)  Maybe it was cleaning the office floor yesterday morning, because I was going to have to be rummaging around down there and the closer I looked, the worse the clutter and dust got.

     Maybe it was the high-speed pennyfarthing bike ride over to the gyros place and back, fetching dinner.

     Whatever.  I went to bed early, slept very poorly (including one dream involving romantic love-at-first-sight with some guy I never saw before in my life* and Huck fighting -- and defeating -- a mountain lion), then woke reluctantly and late.

     Today I have much to do, almost none of it anything I want to do (a moderately dire family gathering, the very last of the nieces and/or nephews and/or their offspring dropping by Mom X's for "Christmas," which puts even my procrastination to shame, plus rearranging the basement so the Phone Man can get a fine new phone wire from the NI to the high-speed series-of-tubes box, bypassing the old demark and the assortment of ancient R/G/B/Y quad radiating from it -- including one long-disconnected run of cloth-covered twisted-pair-of-pairs that probably dates back to the original telephone installation).  The first one will just be a couple of hours of walking on eggs, the second several hours of hard work. (But it should get us even more speed and maybe less RF noise.)  I've got a short stack of 4x4s in the way, plus in this house of tiny closets there are several racks of clothes that live underground.  And at least one shelf of irreplacable old radios. --Okay, irreplaceable and largely unwanted radios; me and a handful of other geeks are the only folks who notice 'em.

     A full yet strangely empty day and I've got to go start it.   Still beats the unmitigated hell out of shivering in a cardboard box, sleeping on a pile of rags and digging through dumpsters for dinner, a/k/a "My Retirement Plan."
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* Where that came from, I'll never know, and it was as sappy and chastely romantic as a romance comic book from the 1960s.  Second adolescence?

5 comments:

jed said...

My day consists of a lot of housework, and putting a dual-band antenna on the car. Lip mount is easy. No idea if it'll be easy or hard to route feedline from the trunk to the dash.

I don't remember most of my dreams, and good thing too, because I do remember frequently waking up thinking, "Now that was bizarre!". To the extent I do remember them, that is an understatement.

Hope you're able to squeeze some enjoyment in there someplace.

Anonymous said...

My retirement plan was winning the lottery for big bucks. Now that I have been sequestered I can't even afford to buy tickets.....

Anonymous said...

Medications seem to amplify the common dream into the realm of action adventure/exploitation films... Myself and Brian Dennehey fighting alians with swords is an example....

JimBob said...

Anyone know of any Ham Radio events associated with the NRA Convention in April?

Seems like guns 'n radio just go together...

rickn8or said...

Nonnymous, my plan was to find a honey that owned a liquor store/bar, but they all seem to be spoken for.