Home is the sailor...

After an ardous trip of fighting sea serpants and almost falling off the edge of the world into the dark abyss, I have arrived home.

It was a basically boring drive that I managed to make in pretty good time and when I got near the home base I turned on the little 2 meter HT I carry and surprised myself by hitting a local repeater.

Someone on the other end reminded me that a local club was meeting at 1900.

I looked at my watch and gave the rig a little more gas got home. I had about a little under an hour to myself and went inside and organized a few things. There was a stack of QSL cards I scanned through and checked off a few more states on my list. Than went to the meeting.

It was interesting as there was a presentation showing how to hook a laptop up to a basic HF rig. Most of the rigs they make these days that are above entry level have various chips in them that permit hooking them up to a laptop and running the rig off of one.

While I have no interest in doing such a thing because I am Old School, it was interesting to watch. My IC-718 is a fairly simple rig and there is not a whole lot of computer stuff in it so I would be very limited. That is a part of the reason I bought the rig, it's simple.

I showed up in travel clothes that were not too bad and I was invited to join and I accepted. These are the guys that keep a pair of local repeaters running so I figured I might as well support them because I use their repeater.

The club used to meet at the local library and use the lawn there for field days but one day the library people told them basically to go away.

I guess there were complaints about one field day when they rerouted traffic and somebody's grandmother was stumbling around with a confused look saying, "Well...well...I don't understand. I ALWAYS drive through that way."

Either that or some panicky idiot said, "There's ELECTRICITY in those wires! Children could get hurt!"

You would be surprised how many electrophobes there are in this world and I am not kidding. There are a lot of people out there that are deathly scared of electricity and there is really nothing you can do to educate them or teach them that electricity is not going to jump out of a socket and zap them. We're talking emotion here and no amount of education will cure such a person.

One of the funniest things I have ever seen was back in high school when one of the guys built a huge Tesla coil and used it as some kind of presentation in an English class. (I think they were trying to teach us how to speak in public or something) Nobody knew the English teacher was an electrophobe.

He lit it off there were all kinds of mad scientist crackling sounds and huge sparks and the teacher totally freaked out. He shut it down and I helped him cart the infernal machine out of the room and down to the AV room where a period or two later the pair of us and a couple of the science teachers played with it. We got to skin out of study hall to go to the AV room.

I guess it was then that I learned you can not cure an electrophobe.

Anyway, the club got the boot and now meets at a local church and I think the facilities there are probably better for the guys.

WHile it was an interesting meeting, the timing was lousy as I really don't like to come home and go straight into gear. I need decompression time and today is decompression Thursday. I will do little today except hook up the rigs. I may not even turn them on.

Incidentally, if any of you readers are wives of guys that travel or work at sea, camp type jobs or drive long haul trucks I will give you a little tip that your hubby will greatly appreciate.

Do NOT hand him a 'honey-do' list when he walks in the door. GIve him some time to decompress. In my case it often takes a while to swap over to the 'shoreside mode'.

While the body can do the switch easily the mind needs a little time.

I'm running out of time as I have to get some grub so I will leave it at that.









my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/