Only one out of two is pretty bad.
I'm talking, of course about last Saturday's post about "a strange weekend before an important weekend." But it's worse than that. All told, I spent hours on Monday and Tuesday working on the weed removal, and that cap I included a picture of when it was in place on the weed trimmer broke within a few minutes of turning it on back on last Monday. I had to print a replacement, which meant I had to push that overnight to Tuesday.
Still, the weed trimming was complete in a day's worth of work. The radio contest was great on Saturday the 14th but was almost completely dead today. There's simply no way anybody working in the contest for points could have had a competitive score with one day.
My emphasis in these contests is essentially never for scoring lots of points; my emphasis tends to be working "new ones" where new can mean, a state, a Maidenhead Grid, or a new country. All for collecting "wallpaper." Over the course of the hours spent in BIC time (Butt In Chair) you'll see the odd specificity of cross county openings that seems to be from the "couple of square miles" you're sitting in to a random couple of other square miles hundreds or thousands of miles away. Then suddenly the exact locations of the other ends you hear change, some times just to an adjacent grid square, 3 or 4 miles away, sometimes hopping over neighboring squares to connect you to more distant places. Often one or both ends of those cross-country hops reverse resulting in hearing the far end move back and forth.
This year so far had a few days that resulted in great totals but yesterday was probably the best day of the year. The problem is it would have been better for the contest if both days had been good instead of one truly great and one well-below average.
If I gave you a bad impression that this weekend be better than it ended up being: my apologies. There's a popular quote that I use often, accredited to physicist Niels Bohr: "Prediction is very difficult. Especially if it's about the future." Because of that, I don't usually do bold quotes and predictions.
You're not likely to encounter anyone more disappointed than I am about the contest.
I've published this map several times; it's map of all the Two Letter grid
squares in the USA handed out by
Icom America at
hamfests and other gatherings. This map gets you to the first level of descriptors, things like EM00 - two letters, two numbers. The level below this gets you two more letters after the number. So you get to smaller grid units like EM00aa.
No big deal that I didn't get the dipole up, then. Had the grandkids over, and that kinda blew out the weekend.
ReplyDeleteGood to see you're doing better. How's the healing coming along?
As far as I can tell, I might be healing. It's only since Thursday, so I just notice the hard stuff to do is still hard to do but a little bit better than four days ago.
DeleteThe healing is like a endurance event, like doing a hundred mile bike ride or running a marathon. It just kinda wears on you. So far, it hurts pretty much all the time, just a bit less after I take their pain pills. It's not like it never hurts, and it's not like it hurts so much I feel like I need to call them to do something more. I just get into trades like their pain pills reduce the pain better but they don't last as long so I sleep longer overnight taking plain, old, over-the-counter "extra strength Tylenol" than their prescription. For sitting around the house (or the radio room) I may as well not take the prescription and just take Tylenol. Except that I think Tylenol is more dangerous than narcotics. AFAIK, more people have had their livers ruined by Tylenol than narcotics.
"......one truly great and one well-below average."
ReplyDeleteI think there's a quote somewhere about a guy with his feet frozen and his hair on fire.
When asked how he was doing, he said "On average, I'm OK."
I had not heard your quote from the Danish theoretical physicist before and it was both accurate, and not borhing.