Sailboat size for ocean travel.

I figure about 27 to 35 feet sounds about right, depending on if one is singlehanding or running with someone else.

Anything smaller won't carry enough food and water and anything much bigger requires too much maintenance.

My Sailstar Corsair was 24' 7" and was suitable for crossing the Gulf of Alaska a couple of times. While I was living in Kodiak I probably could have gone to Hawaii in her but I would have been pretty dried out and skinny when I arrived.

Here's a couple of file photos.

I had the dinette model. I 

Full keel and attached rudder as seen here.

Click on the images.

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Some idiot asked on another board what they are supposed to do when a policeman tells them to stay in their car.

I replied that they should stay in their car.

What is so difficult about that?

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Not an absolute.

One of my old classmates made a post elsewhere that a man stops being a man when he hits a woman. What bullshit!

A man stops being a man when he hits a lady is more like it.

Every single creature on God's Green Earth has a God given right to self-defense, period. They have a right to defend themselves against any threat regardless of the race, creed, color, sex, age, or natural/national origin of their attacker.

I don't care who you are. If you don't behave yourself and get smacked for it then that's just too damned bad.

========================================

As far as domestics go I am a firm believer in the Law of Three Retreats.  

If the verbally attacked person leaves the area in a retreat and the attacker follows them and the attacked retreats twice again and the attacker keeps up the pursuit, after three retreats whatever happens to them is just too damned bad. That goes for everyone regardless of anything. 

If the attacker keeps bringing the fight to the attacked the attacked has a right to stop the action by any method necessary.

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The older I get the less Faith I have in juries

in no little part because people have gotten more and more stupid over the years. They've also gotten less education on how the system is supposed to work.

Most Karen and Ken types figure that if the police arrested someone it's because they are guilty when the truth is they arrested the person because they THINK he's guilty.

It's up to the jury to decide if the authorities are correct or not.

Another big thing is that in this day and age not too many people are willing to do. It takes character to oppose the majority. It's just a whole lot easier to throw some poor bastard to the wolves.

Also people don't even understand how the system works.

Many years ago I was on a jury and it was obvious the state didn't have their act together. The defendant was a known prostitute and was charged something else vaguely related.

Eleven of us wanted to throw it out because it was a waste of everyone's time and money. None of us even had a clue as to why the case even came up.

The staunch woman that wanted to vote guilty "because she's a prostitute".

It took us about 3/4s of an hour to explain to her how the system worked and that she was not charged with being a prostitute but being charged with a different crime and what she did for a living had nothing to do with the case.

The other thing about juries is that too many people try and shirk their civic duty and squirm out of jury duty.

That means that most juries are packed with people that were not smart enough to squirm out of it.

Another thing is that the system doesn't like juries that know what they're doing. About 25 years ago I was called and I was truthful when they questioned me. I said that I had read up on my duties as a juror and understood how the system was supposed to work. A couple of questions later I was dismissed out of hand, sent on my way and have never been called again.

***************************

In other gnus I wanted breakfast and while scouting through the fridge saw some roast beef, too little to make a decent sandwich with so I used it in an omelet with some onion and exrta sharp cheddar cheese.

It came out pretty good and I'll certainly make another one sometime in the future.

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Mowed the lawn yesterday and the manse looks pretty good.

This year I'm going to eliminate a couple of flower garden spots because the amount of work keeping them weeded has made the juice not worth the squeeze. The weeds have won.

Several years ago I did this to a flower garden that became a nuisance. I simply salted it one September and killed off everything. It was a bare patch but the snows and April rains drove the salt well underground so I reseeded the area with grass seed and it looks pretty good now. I'm probably going to do this somewhere else come fall. Thistle has taken hold and that's a fight that is hard to win as they are hard to kill. Time to fall back and regroup and go scorched earth.

Sometimes it's a lot easier to just wipe the slate clean and start over.

I'm wondering what to do about a fallen tree in the wayback. I'll likely buck it up and hire some kid to hump the bolts to the pile and just let them rot which actually happens fairly quickly around here.

When we moved in 30 years ago and my Charles Atlas course was still current we rented a chipper and created a chip pile that was 10 feet tall and inside of five years had vanished.

Anyway I suppose I will spend a chunk of the day outdoors which is always rather nice.

 

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April is almost over and God only knows what's coming up in May

March and April have been pretty boring months although shooting season has started and I have gotten out a couple of times.

Winter seems to be pistol season and now we're working into rifle season. We shall see what we shall see.

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I just read where some city is up in arms over an LGBTQ pride event.

I didn't have to read very far to decide that if you permit the LGBTQ crowd to have a pride celebration that you have to permit the straight community the same opportunity to have a straight pride event.

It's either all of us or none of us.

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I think I am going to start shooting five stand

but for my own reasons.

There's something about the different stands where they send up the clay bird and some kind of order but I'm not interested in that or prizes, awards, and so on.

I have not been out with a shotgun for a long time and I would like to relearn wing shooting. Skeet and trap seem too repetitious and maybe five stand will get that way but it'll take a while for me to get used to it. 

What I'm looking for is something that pops out of nowhere and I have to react and shoot it. For me there generally has to be a somewhat practical reason before I try something out.

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WOW! Close call!

That asteroid damned near hit the visitors center! It would have vaporized it!

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Yesterday's work day

where we bit off a piece a little bigger than we could chew.

We managed to clean out two block houses at either end of the range which was a chore in itself. They hadn't been gone through in years and years and we threw out a lot of stuff.

One of the problems with a chore  like that is the tendency old men have of saying "Hey! That's still good!" even though it hasn't been used in twenty years. 

Of course that will be met with "I just used that the other day!" 

Yeah, right. The other day was April 7th...........1984.

Anyway, that was only a part of the activity. The firing line got leveled and the sod replaced with a layer of fine limestone and that will dry out quickly after a rainfall and should be better for the shooter in the prone position. It'll eliminate the mud, too.

That was a pretty big job and was close to completion when I left.

Needless to say, the first person to complain that wasn't there is going to get a damned smart answer.

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I'm caught between a rock and a hard spot.

I was watching someone load a bunch of grub into his car. I offered to help as I sometimes do and commented "That's a lot of grub."

"Yeah. I got it for $40 because I got a self check-out discount."

If he was being sarcastic (I don't think he was) then he got me. Fair and square.

If he wasn't he was a f***ing thief. 

On the other hand it's hard to blame him because self check-out makes it too damned easy. They say that it saves us money but I doubt that seriously. 

People are divided into three categories. There are the great minority of those that are 100% honest, a minority of those that are patently dishonest and the vast majority of people that wish they were 100% honest.

What irks me is that a lot of idiots think that theft is a big victory over the corporations when the bottom line is that it isn't. The corporation doesn't lose a dime. They simply raise prices to compensate for their loss. WE pay for it.

Whoever came up with the self check-out idea should be made to live under the 38th Street Bridge. He's cost us a lot of money.

On the other hand if I have to go to the store and help unload trucks I WILL pay myself via self check-out.

8888888888888888888888888888

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I just sent to Casablanca for a QSL card.

which I want even though I have Morocco confirmed. 

Having seen the movie I've always wanted to work the place.

I was seriously tempted to ask if Rick's Place is still there but at the last minute I decided that it might be misconstrued as being insulting or otherwise offensive.

Normally that would not bother me but I do want the card.

In other gnus I worked Easter Island last night on 12 and 15 meters, about 5 minutes apart.

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Well, another day, another dime.

Saturday is a club workday and my assignment has already been made.

I am to clean out this blockhouse next to the firing lane. It'll likely take me a while because of all the accumulated crap that's gathered in it over the years.

A big part of what's in the blockhouse are things that have been left behind after matches and about 87% of it is worthless otherwise the owner would have retrieved the item.

I've already said that most of it is getting pitched and the two guys running the range agree with me.

I suggested we use the stuff I'm not putting back into the blockhouse to use for a fund raiser. You buy a $5 ticket and we hand you an item and if you know who left the item on what year you win $100.

"Billy Joe Bob left that here back in 1983!"  

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I may be 100% wrong but I think that if

Israel could just whack the Ayatollahs with little collateral damage that Iran would westernize in a heartbeat.

I am old enough to recall the influx of Iranians that immigrated to the States after the Shah got the boot. In fact I knew a number of Iranians. Some of them had a relationship of some sort with the Shah. One was the son of the Shah's personal photographer. 

I got the feeling that the reason the Shah got booted out was because of corruption and not necessarily religious fervor. When something like that happens people tend to think that anything is an improvement.

Then again I might be 180 degrees off course.

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Good morning.

I just woke up and as the coffee was brewing I wandered out to the front porch made a fairly loud 'woof' and was treated for my troubles by hearing the neighborhood dogs start barking.

One of the neighbors knows I sometimes do this and thinks it rather amusing. 

It's a satisfying way to occasionally start the day. Most people are inside so it doesn't really bother them because nobody keeps their windows open yet or they're already up and about.

I think that almost everyone only keeps their windows open for a few weeks in the spring because when it really heats up they keep them closed and turn on the AC.

It's supposed to be warm today so I think I'll do a little gardening which I think old men are supposed to do.

Maybe I'll build a bird house out of scrap lumber. 

Looks like a pretty good day coming my way. We'll see.

********************************

In other news, I read that in 2016 someone made a 10 hour long feature film called 'Paint drying'.

That's what it was, 10 long hours of watching paint dry.

The filmmaker did this to make the British Board of Film Classification have to watch all 10 hours of it to be able to give it the proper age classification.

A stroke of genius!

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Did some pretty good shooting yesterday

The first thing I did was scrawl 'OOC' (Out of competition) across my scorecard which meant I was just shooting to be shooting. I had to get out of the house.

I had my service rifle with me along with my bolt gun and at the last minute grabbed the bolt gun for reasons I won't get into.

I used the slow offhand to tune the scope up a bit and got it dialed in and just played around with the rapids. I got three off on the first string and five off on the second string and did OK. I was waiting for slow prone.

Not only did I keep all of my rounds in the black, but I had no sevens and only a couple of eights, ending up with a 184/200 which ain't that bad and is pretty good when you figure the X-ring is 1.79 inches in diameter and the 8-ring is 7.79 inches in diameter at 200 yards.

That means I kept 20 consecutive shots inside 3.9 MOA and on top of that only had a couple of eights.

Considering my eyesight has gotten so bad that even through the scope I was holding on the center of a blur that ain't too bad.

I've got an eye appointment coming up and I think I'm going to go and get my eyes fixed and see what happens. 

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Off to the range today.

Yesterday I pitched in and helped out at a Marine Corps League match which was kind of chaotic in a sense. It seemed they all forgot most of what they learned in boot camp which was funny. They WERE SAFE though and I suppose that's 99.9999999999% of it.

Today I might shoot a match. It depends on how confident I am when I get there. 

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An open letter to one of my neighbors

over the way they are raising their children.

For quite some time you have heard me rant about "F*** the children!" as a knee jerk to those that plead with the old saw "Do it for the children.".

Dear neighbor, 

You are doing a wonderful job of raising both your kids. They don't effect me negatively in any way whatsoever. In fact they are a joy to watch, talk to and be around.

Keep up the good work! It is a joy to watch a pair of responsible parents in action!

Pic

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I just got a song stuck in my head from 1959

from a TV commercial that came out in 1959.

It's from a Kellogg's cereal that only lasted about 2 or 3 years.

Kellogg's OKs.

I finally got so weirded out I sand the song aloud and went to Youtube and found the ad video there and I'll be damned but I had sung it word for word.

It's crazy what sticks in a person's mind. I likely have not heard that ad since about 1961.

I hope it goes away soon.

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Another rainy day.

It's been raining off and on almost all month. The first sunny day we have and the lawn is going to grow about a foot tall and I'll have to start mowing it.

We've been getting flash flood warnings for days. The Ohio River is much higher than normal according to the reports I've been getting.

What's funny is that the people that get upset the most by these are the people that live on top of hills where they are in no danger.

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Screw the children!

If you can't raise children responsibly on your own then don't have them.

YOUR children are not MY responsibility. I am not willing to change my life in any way simply because YOU want to have children.

That's generally my answer to anyone that pleads with me to 'do it for the children'.

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Oh, well.

Rain today.

Rain tomorrow.

Rain the rest of the week.

Sucks.

The first sunny day and the lawn will sprout up about a foot and the lawn mowing cycle begins which in itself isn't a bad deal as I don't mind mowing it.

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You know, someone could get an Article 15 for that!

And if it were me I would probably take it STRAIGHT to the JAG office and look into the possibility of filling charges against the battery commander for Conduct Unbecoming an Officer.

Either way I would demand my right to trial by Courts-Martial.

The reason I even bothered to post this is because even back in the day there was always someone somewhere along the line stupid and chicken$hit enough to make a big deal out of nothing.

Hell, Jimmy Dolittle tied his Japanese issued medals to the tail of a bomb just before the Tokyo raid.

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speak of the Devil and there he is!

Yesterday I mentioned a check coming from the lost property department being due to arrive.

Later that day I opened the mailbox and there it was.

$82.65. Not bad. 

I'll probably turn it into ones and use it for QSL cards and range fees.

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I have a check of some sort coming from the State Department of Lost Property

I ran a search and found out there was some missing money out there with my name on it and applied for it.

It's supposedly under $100 but two bucks is two bucks more than I have now so WTF. Why not?

My guess is that it's $2.79 but I suppose that it could be as much as $99.99 which would be well worth the few minutes I spent putting in for it.

Whatever, it's going to be interesting to find out.

Whatever it is I will probably get a laugh out of it of one kind or the other. I'll either say 'Oh, well' or 'YES!'

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Last minute Hail Mary play

I almost missed a day because I ran off to a shooting match this morning and forgot about everything else.

At the match I was asked to help out at a Marine Corps League match Next Saturday and plan on doing so.

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Had business downtown the other day and

once inside I went into every man's room I could find and looked behind the toilets for envelopes containing bribes that had not been picked up yet.

I guess someone beat me to it.

====================================

I wonder what I'd do with, say, $50K I found there. 

Maybe I'd buy a new pickup or something. Who knows?

First thing I'd do is go out to dinner.

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What's a 'big kid'?

I just had an amusing thought that goes back to childhood and the term 'big kid'.

As in "some big kid stole my lunch money". or whatever.

If I recall clearly and look back on it, the generally unspoken rule of thumb was that if someone was was either a couple years older or about a head taller he was a big kid. The inverse holds true, also. A couple of years or a head shorter was a little kid and it pretty much stayed that way until somewhere around high school.

Hmmm...Haven't thought of that one for decades.

 

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Go to about 16:18

It's a funny episode and there's more than a kernel of truth to what the deli owner said about crime and why there were no robberies in the precinct anymore. It's because the residents didn't tolerate them and after robberies became unprofitable they stopped.

As usual, Gunther and Toody are in hot water for not enforcing all the petty-assed bull$hit that happens on their beat and the captain raises hell about it.

Meanwhile the inspector notices that there have been no serious crimes committed in their area of responsibility for almost a decade and tries to find out why. 

It really is pretty funny but the point that makes sense is that if people don't tolerate crime it will stop.

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One day going through the chow line.

I was going through the eggs to order line and wanted a ham and cheese omelet. The cook was having a bad day and as he was flipping it the omelet slipped off the spatula and busted open a bit.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "Just cook it and serve it to me. It'll be just fine. I see you're having a bad day .. Maybe it'll get a little better."

"You sure?" he asked.

"Yeah, no problem. It'll be just fine," I said.

And it was. The omelet went in one end and out the other like it was supposed to.

Not making a big deal out of a lousy omelet turned out to be one of the most fruitful things I did in the Army. From that day on he always took extra good care of me in the chow line.

In garrison it was OK but in the field it was a Godsend.

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Something I HIGHLY recommend is going to zip-codes.com

every so often and checking to see if your zip code has changed.

While the basic first five digits seldom change, they actually can as the population shifts. Still, it's fairly rare. It's the last four that can change with little or no warning.

Mine hasn't changed since I got it but overseas hams report that a lot of QSL cards using the 5 digit zip get returned and so do a few that use the 9 digit zip. 

I sent a QSL manager zip-codes.com and he reported a couple of people he had mailed QSL cards to have had theirs changed.

Whatever, just a public service announcement from the Hash.

https://www.zip-codes.com/

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Well, I'm the Nextdoor a$$hole....again. What's new?

Someone posted one of those 'isn't he wonderful?' posts on Nextdoor. Apparently some IT guy hooked up her printer and didn't charge her for it as sort of a favor and she just had to tell the world she got a freebie.

This is my answer.

You are doing NOBODY any favors by bringing the fact that someone threw you a freebie. Had you done it to me it would have been the LAST favor I ever did you. What you did here is open up a kind soul to having his good nature taken advantage of. I will be rather surprised if he doesn't get calls from people expecting him to work for them for little or nothing. When someone does you a favor be grateful and keep it to yourself. ASK ME HOW I KNOW THIS!

Needless to say I got crucified by all the little karens and my post reported and yada yada yada.

I'm Old School and when someone tosses me a bone I keep my damned mouth shut to protect my benefactor from being flooded by a bunch of people with their hand out asking for the same treatment.

If anybody asks I simply say I got a pretty good price on something and leave it at that just to prevent my benefactor from being flooded with the usual Free $hit Army battalion.

Needless to say, a lot of karens were mad at me because many of them are card carrying FSA members and/or nosy busybodies. If the shoe fits...

Back in the day when I was a one man small town contractor I did toss out a lot of bones but I always put a caveat on it that the recipient keep their damned mouth shut or the freebies would go away.

Actually most of the freebies I threw out were repaid in kind. Eventually I'd get a drink bought for me or some venison or halibut which was gratefully accepted. When I got repaid in kind I always kept quiet about it because it was nobody's business.

During that period of time I did do a lot of small pro bono things here and there. It helped build up a customer base and I did do a number of jobs on 'street credit' because the people I did work for always paid their bills. 

If anyone asked what I was charging someone my reply was always "That's between us." 

Actually I learned about big mouths as a youngster. 

Once I was swimming at the pond and a little kid that didn't know how to swim jumped off of the 'dam' and went into a panic.

I simply reached down and grabbed his arm and hauled him back onto the dam with no bull$hit or fanfare and told him to go home.

I guess he told his mother because my mom got a call and afterwards told me the kid's mom was going to write the editor of the small town rag we had and tell everyone what a hero I was. I paled.

The first thing that came out of my mouth was "I should have let him drown. Call her and stop her and tell her to shut up about it."

"Oh, but...yada yada yada." she replied and I repeated myself. "Call her and tell her to keep quiet about it! I'm serious!"

More yada yada yada. No help, either.

About 15 minutes later my dad walked in. I took one look at him and pointed at him and then pointed down hard. It was the signal he used on me to tell me to meet him in the basement NOW.

His eyes widened. He knew I had never used the signal on him.

We went downstairs and I pled my case and pointed out that my classmates would have a field day with this and torment the hell out of me. Dad looked at me and said, "I'll handle this immediately."

I was in the other room and only heard part of the conversation. "Know what he said? He said he should have let your son drown. If this hits the paper I know my son. When he gets tormented by his classmates over this he IS going to retaliate, most likely it will involve paint or fire and I'm not going to punish him for it! Tell your wife to smarten up! Look, Tom. My son saved your son's life and all he wants in return for your son is for your wife to keep her goddam mouth shut! He wants to be left alone. It's the least you can do!"

Thank you, Dad. 

It did get pretty much buried and only a couple of neighbors found out (She just HAD to say SOMETHING to SOMEONE) about the incident so it wasn't too hard to deal with but from that day forward I knew how to handle a favor or a freebie.

Some years back I had an unnamed electrician do a small job for me. It was no biggie and the agreed on price was $150. When he was done I tossed him a 100 ml of Jim Beam and reached for my wallet. He said, "Ah, just give me a hundred bucks and keep your mouth shut."

Done deal and when someone asked me what I had been charged I simply said I had gotten a pretty good deal on it and left it at that.

My dealings with the Old School trash guys were legendary and I guarded that relationship closely. When someone asked how come they took practically anything I left on the curb I explained to her that I knew one of the trash guys because we went to different schools together and left it at that.

Actually one thing I did to the trash guys once endeared me to them. I once snagged a mannequin and then off to Goodwill for a cheap pair of sexy mules and a pair of black fishnets which I clad said mannequin in and stuffed it into the trash can head first with the legs sticking up.

Of course someone reported it and I watched a police car pull up and was treated to watching the officer shake his head and laugh as he drove off but I digress.

The trash guys laughed like hell and I knew I had made their day a little better for it. I think the next week they ditched four old tires or some damned thing for me but whatever.

One other thing I will post no details on is the time I got a $5000 mysterious home repair job done for about $300 and a bottle of Jim Beam. I sure kept my mouth shut on that one!

I'm 100% sure that if I ever mentioned that deal I would have ruined it for others as the entire FSA would have descended on the poor guy.

The afternoon after I made my Nextdoor post I spent an afternoon with a few people at the range and when I discovered that two of the guys were self-employed I asked them about tossing someone a bone. Both of them said they used to but don't anymore in general.  One of them said he charges $10 for opening the hood. The other  stated on the very rare instances he does it's for a regular customer and he admonishes the customer to keep it under his hat.

They reported that a big part of the reason they run their businesses this way is because people have to brag about getting getting taken care of and it draws the inevitable FSA expecting $25 brake jobs and the like.

I think that as I wrote this that I can give an example most karens can understand.

How would you like being descended on by every horned toad and dweeb in your class because your date to the big dance told everyone about what went on in the back seat of his car later on that night?

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY

Another day working DX

which was fun because everyone and their cousin was on the air including the Chinese. I worked 3 separate Chinese stations in 18 minutes.

The rules for working contesters are that to work a contesting station you have to give him a QSO number. Using the number of contacts you have made that day suffices. 

Some of the contesters I heard had made over 2000 contacts and because I was cherry picking I made about 20, all interesting DX.

It's kind of funny when someone says 'Number 1874' and I reply with 'Number 6'.

88888888888888888888888888888888

To which I will add that it just as hard to pray for someone you wish would slip on a banana peel as it is to pray for someone you wish would fall down a 300 foot mine shaft. 

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY