At our monthly Portneuf ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) meeting on Thursday evening we spent most of the meeting discussing the Pocatello 50 race which will be held on Saturday, May 29th in the hills west and south of Pocatello. The club will be providing the radio communications between the six aid stations and the start/finish line of the 51.8 mile race.
The weather has been very much wintery in the entire northwest. We’ve had lots of rain, some pretty heavy snow squalls, and even some snow-thunder storms around. I think it’s the same way every year … but we still wish it would be spring for more than a couple of days in a row.
A few weeks ago I invited Glenn D. Thackray, an Idaho State University professor, to our Portneuf Rotary Club to do a presentation on where we get our drinking water and the quality of the water. He’s been doing a study on this for a number of years. He gave a very compelling presentation. While our water meets or exceeds the federal standards, it is a fairly fragile system.
Tonight he was presenting at the Pocatello City Council chambers. Nina and I went over and he gave us an excellent overview with some newer information. A pretty good crowd were in attendance.
A couple of people were there with definite agendas. On fellow challenged Dr. Thackray several times even though there was nothing to challenge. Towards the end, the crowd was pretty unhappy with him and wanted him to be quiet so the presentation could be completed.
Dr. Thackray’s presentation simply showed what the data says about our very unique aquifer about 30 feet underneath the city’s streets. There are a number of threats to our drinking water supply, including that we’re pulling about 7.8 billion gallons a year out of the aquifer and only about 7.1 billion gallons, on average, is going into the system. While the water meets and generally exceeds Federal standards as set by the EPA, a couple of the measurements are creeping uncomfortably close to the limits.
However, this fellow was sure that we are not taking more out than is being replenished from the snowpack in the mountains and that any contamination is in the past and our water is better than ever. Unfortunately, he’s pretty much wrong. Why do people with no data feel it so important to challenge at every front someone who does have the peer-reviewed data, the analysis, and the floor? I’m sure we were there a half-hour longer than necessary.
It was good to hear the information again. Problem prevention is certainly much cheaper than problem correction.
In the Ham Radio world, I’m pretty much not having a lot of luck with HF equipment. My newest unit was sent back to the company for repair. The other, older transceiver is up for sale. I’ve had a couple of bites, but no serious takers just yet. I had an antenna tuner for it that I also listed for sale and it sold very quickly. So, now I have an HF transceiver but need a tuned, resonant antenna for it.
A while ago I bought a portable setup that can be tuned to work in the 20 meter band. It can either be a mobile antenna on the car, or it can be set up as a normal antenna. The other day I set it up in the front yard and got it tuned. It worked pretty well, but was rather obvious in front of our covenant-regulated house.
This afternoon I began the process of moving it to the northeast corner of the backyard. In the process I would be putting it another 8 feet higher in the air. I got about halfway done when a wind and rain storm came over the hill and pretty much drove me back inside. I’ll finish it tomorrow … maybe that’ll be the picture of the day??
Nina and I both had some errands to run, and she needed a new chair for her desk in the computer room. So we went to OfficeMax and found her a nice chair on sale. After that we decided to have our Mothers Day dinner by eating lunch at Costa Vida. We ran into some friends there who had just returned from a two-week cruise through the Panama Canal (me: very envious). We’ll need to go over soon to see them and their pictures.
The new chair is now assembled and Nina is certainly much more comfortable as she works on Family History and on indexing (she’s become quite addicted to the indexing process). Tomorrow we’ll be back to sunshine after a cloudy with occasional showers day today. The lawn needs desperately to be mowed. Dang! That’s a lot of walking.
The current project I’m working on requires an Adobe Flash process. Over my career I’ve actively avoided anything to do with Flash. For the non-geeks of the world, Flash is a language for doing lots of pizzazzy stuff on a website, including moving things, playing movies, and such. There’s a lot of technical reasons why I don’t particularly like Flash. However, today I’ve spent much of the day learning the programming language for generating Flash content to be put on a website. The language is called ActionScript. I bought a couple of books on ActionScript at the Barnes and Noble store in Idaho Falls last Friday. One book is 900 pages long, the other is 560 pages long.
Adobe has a number of tutorial videos available (also Flash content) and I spent quite a bit of time working through a couple of them. I’m getting close to where I can actually do the work I’ve been contracted to do. It is fun learning something new, although I don’t think I’ll use this very much.
It was warm enough today (the warmest day of the year so far) that I actually considered turning on the air conditioning. I didn’t. It’d sure be nice to have about a month between turning off the furnace and turning on the air conditioning. I’m not murmuring, mind you, just observing….
We had the general session of our Stake Conference this morning. The plan was to broadcast video and audio from the Stake Center into another building in our Stake and out to the Arbon Branch building about 45 minutes south of Pocatello. The main part of Stake Conference was being broadcast from Salt Lake City and at the appropriate time each of the buildings would pick up the broadcast from Salt Lake, and then switch back to the broadcast from the Stake Center at the end of the Salt Lake feed.
There are still plenty of technical issues to be worked out. But, it was a good conference and I enjoyed hearing from some of our Church leaders as well as President Monson.
After Conference I conducted two ordinations to High Priest, we came home and got a bite to eat, and then drove over to Soda Springs to spend some time with mother. We took dinner over and spent a couple of hours there.
Mother is doing pretty well. Her phone had stopped working and hopefully we’ve figured out that problem. I tried to replace the rope for her flag out front and only succeeded in pulling the rope clear out of the pulley at the top. Now I have to take the whole flagpole down to rethread the new rope. We’ve taken it down before. It’s not hard, just need a couple of people to assist so it doesn’t fall into the house and break something if we loose hold of it.
We seem to really be into Spring. That also means there’s a boatload of yard work awaiting. Ugh.
Today and tomorrow are the Pocatello Stake Conference session. My first meeting is at 4:00 p.m. where I’m playing the organ for the meeting. That’s followed by an adult session at 7 p.m. and a general session tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
After the session tomorrow, I’ll be conducting three Priesthood ordinations, two to High Priest and one to Elder. Then we’ll go to Soda Springs. Mother’s brand new replacement phone for her brand new cordless phone stopped working yesterday afternoon. Very frustrating for her.
Political campaigning is in full swing. Rather, political campaign signs are in full swing. No one really seems to be doing any real campaigning. Click on the picture….
Today was our normal shift at the Idaho Falls Temple. Up at 4, out the door by 4:45, in prayer meeting at 6, shift ended at 11:45, followed by lunch in the cafeteria. It was a very busy day at the temple. I like busy days there!
This afternoon I had an interesting experience. I had my ham radio scanning a radio band when a fellow I know called on one of the repeaters wanting to know if anyone could hear him.
I responded. He said he was up in the mountains with no cell phone coverage and wanted to know if I’d give his wife a call on her cell phone and ask if she had any pillows in her car.
It took a few minutes, but I did reach her on her cell phone. She had just come into cell phone coverage driving down from the mountains back into Pocatello. I asked her about pillows.
“Oh my goodness!” she replied. She said she was turning right around.
It turns out my ham radio friend was up in the mountains on a father and son campout. He’d just been deposited there by his wife, but didn’t get everything out of the car before she left.
He’s now reunited with his pillow.
Ham radio to the rescue … Ham Radio: When All Else Fails!
I woke up about midnight last night and turned on my heated mattress pad because it was cold(!). I woke up again at 5 a.m. to turn it off because it was no longer cold outside. No snow, clear skies, and a very lovely day ensued. I even opened the window in my office / computer room because the sun shining in the window made the room very warm.
I spent much of the day working on a website and got quite a few little issues fixed for them. Tonight was our monthly Pocatello Amateur Radio Club meeting and the topic was solar power and using that to power ham radios. Most ham radios run best on 13.8 volts, but will work reasonably well from about 10 volts to 15 volts. Solar panels have fluctuating voltage, particularly under load, so most of the discussion was about the various ways to smooth out the voltage without loosing very much power. It was an interesting discussion. There have been quite a few recent advances in solar panels and I suspect that the price is going to come down fairly rapidly as the efficiency increases and demand increases.
Nina has been in Pleasant View, Utah this evening at a Church meeting. She’ll be home after I get to bed. We’ve got another early Friday morning on tap.
