After a lot of study and work, I took the exam on Saturday (March 8th) and PASSED! That was a great achievement.

I’d been working on this for almost two years and not getting very far. The ARRL study guide just wasn’t working for me. So, I bought the Gordon West book.  That was better, but as soon as I got into the section where I had to figure out how to convert between rectangular and polar coordinates and figure out whether voltage was leading current or vice versa, I was lost. Perhaps the biggest problem was I didn’t have any clue why this was important.

I’d seen several advertisements for hamtestonline and decided to give it a try.

That made all the difference. Not only were the explanations clear, the whole study process worked very well for me. When it finally was time to take the exam, I was very comfortable with the material and aced the test. This was the right way for me.

So, what’s the benefit? In addition to joining the elite folks in amateur radio, there are more frequencies available, the license is recognized in most of the world, and I can be part of giving back to the hobby. I’m pretty stoked!!

This year is the 100th anniversary of the ARRL, the national association for amateur radio. As part of the celebration, the ARRL’s flagship radio station W1AW is working from each state in the United States and most territories. This past week was Idaho’s turn and it was here in Pocatello. With Nina’s surgery and everything surrounding that, I only had a few hours available last Wednesday to be part of the activity.

John Wilson K0IP (kilowatt zero india papa) hosted the event and provided all of the hardware and equipment needed to participate. He’s up on the top of a hill, has a big antenna, and a full-powered amplifier (the full legal limit: 1,500 watts). I got there about 1:30 pm and stayed until 5:15 pm. I made more than 400 contacts in that time working on the twenty meter band. The contacts included all over the US, Canada, several in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. I had a great time!

John has more radio equipment than any fifty hams in the country. While I was there, he pulled out the equipment in the picture … a military radio from the 1920’s! Back when horses were a central component of the military! This was a horse-mounted radio package. The chest piece has a microphone, the antenna fits into the flag mount on the saddle. It was later fitted to a jeep when horses began to fall out of favor. What an interesting piece of equipment! John is usually at the Dayton Hamvention selling stuff in the flea market. Maybe this will be there??

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying having reached the top tier in amateur radio ranks!

Ta ta for now!!

 

On Thursday, March 6th, Nina had her left foot fixed at the University of Utah Orthopedic Center. Some calcifications on her heel were rubbing on the Achilles tendon and needed to be removed. We drove down Wednesday evening, spent the night at our daughter’s home, and checked in about 1 pm on Thursday. The facility was excellent and the staff very competent and friendly. I stayed with her until they were ready to take her into the operating room at about 2:30 pm.

About 4 pm the doctor came out and told me that all had gone very well, and a bit better than he had expected. The tendon itself is ok. He had to “debride” it to remove
damaged tissue, but didn’t need to do any grafts or muscle lengthening. While none of that would make any difference to the recovery, the result will be better over time. The complete procedure would have been “left Achilles debridement with secondary reconstruction; Haglund’s resection; gastrocnemius recession….” The resection and recession weren’t necessary. The fact that this was being taken care of early rather than waiting for it to become debilitating certainly made a difference.

She’s in a splint and cannot let the foot touch the ground for the next two weeks. On the 21st she goes back and will be fitted with a boot. Eventually she’ll start putting a little weight on the foot gradually building up over the next six weeks. The full recovery will take at least six months.

We stayed at our daughter’s home on Thursday evening and arrived back in Pocatello late Friday afternoon. The big question was how to get her from the car into the house! Hopping up the steps on crutches was not going to work; we determined that before we left on Wednesday. After a lot of discussion of options, we decided to rent a wheelchair and enlist the help of some friends to pull/push the wheelchair up the front steps and into the house. It worked wonderfully.

So now she has four methods of getting around:

• a pair of crutches (her least favorite)
• A wheelchair (doesn’t get through the door into the bedroom)
• a walker (works OK hopping around and getting into narrow places, but is very slow)
• A kneeling scooter (will definitely become the preferred method)

Today is day 4 of the recovery and has been a good day. She’s getting back to being her normal, independent self. Life is good!

Ta ta for now!

This house is less than a mile from our place. Last Wednesday night the house caught on fire in the middle of the night. No one was injured, but the house is probably a complete loss. Later that afternoon the fire re-ignited from a smoldering mattress requiring another visit from the fire department. That’s a good reminder to check all of the fire alarms tomorrow when we switch from standard time to daylight saving time (the correct spelling, despite all that is seen on Facebook).

A week or so earlier a family of four died from carbon monoxide poisoning. They were a well-known family in the community, part of a much larger family. When they didn’t show up for Church on Sunday morning and then didn’t show up for a family dinner later that day, someone went over to check on them and found them all dead (one died in the shower!). A faulty water heater is suspected to be the cause. Since then every CO detector in town has been sold out! I checked our fire alarms and that’s all they are … fire alarms. We don’t have a CO detector installed. That’s going to change this week as well. I’m not sure we want to be like the woman reported in the news today who had been dead in her car in her garage for six years before she was found.

On Thursday, March 6th, Nina is having surgery on her left leg to remove a bone spur. As is always the cause, you have to do something first before you can do anything and in this case, they have to detach the Achilles tendon before they can do anything about the spur. This will keep her out of action for several weeks as the tendon heals. According to WebMD:

After … surgery, you will likely wear a cast, walking boot, or similar device for 6 to 12 weeks. At first, the cast or boot is positioned to keep the foot pointed downward as the tendon heals. The cast or boot is then adjusted gradually to put the foot in a neutral position (not pointing up or down). Many health professionals recommend starting movement and weight-bearing exercises early, before the cast or boot comes off. Your total recovery time will probably be as long as 6 months.

The University of Wisconsin’s Sports Health website says:

The rehabilitation progresses slowly into strengthening, gait and balancing activities. Rehabilitation guidelines are presented in a criterion based progression. General time frames refer to the usual pace of rehabilitation. However, individual patients will progress at different rates depending on their age, associated injuries, pre-injury health status, rehab compliance, tissue quality and injury severity.

That means she’ll be on crutches or on a kneeling scooter for quite some time!

The interesting problem comes with getting into and out of bed! Our bed is quite high and it’s rather difficult to “hop” into bed while on crutches. We did several experiments and finally figured out that a ramp would be the best solution. So, yesterday I built a ramp. It’s 48″ long and has a lift of 10″ (meaning a 12º upward slope). I put “wings” on the front to prevent it from tipping over and a bit of a slope on the front to keep it from tipping forward. The best part was I that I had almost all of the materials here in my scrap-wood bin. I did buy the ramp itself, which is 17″ x 48″. I think it’s a good solution.

However, that isn’t the end of the problem. Nina sleeps on the left side of the bed (looking from the foot of the bed) and I sleep in the right side. We’ve slept that way for almost all of our (soon to be in June) 50 years of marriage. The surgery is on her left foot. If she were to get into bed on the left side, she would have to lift her left foot onto the bed and somehow use it to scoot onto the bed. That’s not gonna happen. So, we’re switching sides for a few weeks. That will definitely add to the adventure!

Ta ta for now!

Last Thursday evening the Tyhee Stake (located just north of Chubbuck / Pocatello towards Ft. Hall) hosted a stake preparedness fair and invited the Church’s Emergency Radio Communications (ERC) services to participate. The fair was actually quite well attended. I took this picture just as things were getting underway. There were a number of exhibits (including a very tasty setup with home made wheat bread, home churned butter, and raspberry jam) and several seminars. The ERC set up a couple of ham radio stations in the foyer. We had a few people stop by to talk to us about the equipment we had on display. I took my station to the fair as it’s fairly portable (trying to be a bit punny):

I made several contacts using digital communications, including one into Japan. I had a good time, but came away somewhat frustrated.

• The only people who came by were those that were going through that part of the hallway from their cars or heading home.
• Those that did actually stop already had some knowledge about ham radio. We didn’t have an opportunity to do much education.

I had put together a short slide show that I had running on my iPad. No one stopped to take a look at it, perhaps because that wasn’t convenient.

So, I’ve talked with the fellow who handles the ERC and asked that we do something differently in future preparedness fairs:

1. Rather than just set up a couple of ham radio stations, have a booth inside the main hall where everyone is. The attendees in this case were going from right to left past all of the displays. If we were in the traffic flow, we’d have a much better opportunity to tell our story!
2. We should be doing a class on emergency communications.

There’ll be more fairs this spring. Maybe we’ll do something more productive at the ones coming up!

 

A package came today from Pennsylvania. When we opened it, there were Christmas packages inside along with a couple of cards. The wrapped gifts were framed pictures and a set of loose pictures were in one of the cards. So, we laid them all out on the table to admire. We sure did make good looking kids and they’re making delightful grandkids!

I enjoy pictures. That must be somewhat evident as I try to get a picture up on every blog posting. I particularly enjoy pictures of the family. The walls going from the living room to the bedroom are covered with family pictures. This new set will grace the mantle for a while and then move to the walls. Life is good!

Ta ta for now!

 

When Nina’s shift ended at the Idaho Falls Temple at about 7:30 pm on Saturday, we decided to go to dinner in Idaho Falls before heading home. Our original choice was Olive Garden, but when we got there we found that the wait was going to be quite long. That’s a fairly large restaurant, but apparently also quite popular on a Saturday evening. So, we went up the street to our standby favorite, Applebees. We had a nice dinner and drove home. We had left at 10 am to drive up to Idaho Falls and got home just after 9 pm. A nice eleven hour day.

I addition to spending some time in the Temple on Saturday afternoon, I also visited a friend who is incarcerated at the Idaho Falls Community Work Center. He’s serving a two-year fixed, ten year indeterminate sentence for grand larceny. We had a nice visit. He is having a difficult time and dealing with some depression. The enormity of what he has done and it’s affect on him, his family, and his future is weighing very heavily on him. I can only try to imagine what that would be like. In that circumstance it is very easy to become convinced that you have no worth and that there is little, if any hope for the future.

Of course, his crime is bad. Many people were seriously hurt, some financially, some emotionally. The consequences will be evident for the rest of his life. But, there is always hope and there is always a future. My heart goes out to him as he battles through this current circumstances and begins to position himself to come back from this situation and make a future for himself. We all have serious shortcomings. Mine just happen not to be criminal.

Ta ta for now!

 

This weekend was our Ward Conference. The events associated with the conference includes a special meeting in the Idaho Falls Temple along with a temple endowment session. Nina is an ordinance worker at the Temple and this Saturday was one of her four Saturday afternoons that she also works. There are thirteen shifts at the Temple, but not one for Saturday afternoon. Each of the other shifts works four Saturdays during the year to make up for that shift.

So, I went up with her and spent much of the afternoon in the Temple as well. Her shift started at noon and ended at 7 p.m.

The are are two new film presentations at the Temples. While the dialog hasn’t changed, the new film presentations are designed to help patrons think about the covenants and obligations in a different light. They are both very successful in that regard. Both of them put a bit more emphasis on the fall of Adam and the need for a savior Jesus Christ.

Today I was looking through some of the books still to be listed on Amazon (see my post on being a Used Book Salesman). One of the books is titled “Yankee Doodles” and is a collection of American poetry. In there I ran across this poem which interestingly also reflected my thoughts on Adam and the Garden of Eden:

The Old Adam

All night rain fell,
All night unwound a heavy glistening skein.
Two slept well
Beneath thick leafage curtained by the rain.

All night wind blew unending,
All night pursued the same despairing themes–
Triumphal music blending
With Love’s triumphant dreams.

All night the forest crept
With stealthy life and little lanterned eyes;
All night rain wept,
A wild wind roared, and deep in Paradise,
Flame-sentineled, high-walled,
The corpse-cold serpent crawled.

Two slept. Toward morning
Eve murmured, Adam woke
And comfortingly spoke,
Then — open-eyed —
Recalled it all — the Warning,
The strange Beguiling,
The Word defied,
The Exile that ensued….

And so lay smiling,
His heart held breathless with Beatitude.
— William Rose Benét