Authentic thrills for a middle-aged guy
Although it's still the Age of Irony, I tell you this sincerely, authentically, truthfully, from the deepest recesses of my soul. These three things currently happening in my life have me thrilled all out of proportion, all out of compass, all out of... out of... out of sensible superlatives.
So:
I attended my first Ham Radio flea market on the weekend, and bought a used HF transceiver. I figure I can wire a dipole antenna between the house and a couple of trees which are, uhm, kind-of on our property. I'm not sure about trying to build a clever coax-trap multiband dipole or just accept that I need to start small and simple. I've been wanting to wire a dipole for 14 MHz into my house since 1980 or so. Seriously. Why didn't I do it before now? I don't know, but if you wait until the time is right, you'll never do it, or something. Finally, although the time still wasn't right, I took the course and got my license and got a VHF set, and now I've got an HF rig too.
The galleys for the story I sold to Analog arrived for proofreading. I didn't need to make any corrections, but I still went without breathing for probably longer than a middle-aged guy really ought to. In my corporeal life, most people need it explained to them, what Analog magazine is-- so perhaps you'll forgive the not-even remotely subtle self-congratulation now shared, unsolicited, with the people in my online circle. How long has this been going on? Elementary school? So, forty years? Yeah, forty years, I'll go with. Writing cute little stories. Everyone needs a hobby.
You get two supervisors in my program at U of Eh: an academic supervisor and a clinical supervisor-- perhaps so wily clinicians can't sell the academics twenty yards of fallopian tubing and then laugh with other clinicians about it on the internets. My academic supervisor met me at the Starbucks in ECHA to gently suggest that there will be no more extensions on my thesis and he doesn't want to have to read, uhm, shit. "Don't submit shit," said he. "But you won't." So with that to motivate me, I might actually graduate before whatever we're doing for Summer Solstice. And then I'll be done school. I don't think I'll need to go back, and my supervisor suggested a way I could maybe even get to keep my library account after I graduate.
I guess the commonality among the above is in the huge lengths of time for which I've been working with minuscule scraps of consciousness and spare moments towards these comparatively, uhm, tiny things-- about which I am disproportionately thrilled in my deepening middle age.
Anyway, thanks for reading.
So:
I attended my first Ham Radio flea market on the weekend, and bought a used HF transceiver. I figure I can wire a dipole antenna between the house and a couple of trees which are, uhm, kind-of on our property. I'm not sure about trying to build a clever coax-trap multiband dipole or just accept that I need to start small and simple. I've been wanting to wire a dipole for 14 MHz into my house since 1980 or so. Seriously. Why didn't I do it before now? I don't know, but if you wait until the time is right, you'll never do it, or something. Finally, although the time still wasn't right, I took the course and got my license and got a VHF set, and now I've got an HF rig too.
The galleys for the story I sold to Analog arrived for proofreading. I didn't need to make any corrections, but I still went without breathing for probably longer than a middle-aged guy really ought to. In my corporeal life, most people need it explained to them, what Analog magazine is-- so perhaps you'll forgive the not-even remotely subtle self-congratulation now shared, unsolicited, with the people in my online circle. How long has this been going on? Elementary school? So, forty years? Yeah, forty years, I'll go with. Writing cute little stories. Everyone needs a hobby.
You get two supervisors in my program at U of Eh: an academic supervisor and a clinical supervisor-- perhaps so wily clinicians can't sell the academics twenty yards of fallopian tubing and then laugh with other clinicians about it on the internets. My academic supervisor met me at the Starbucks in ECHA to gently suggest that there will be no more extensions on my thesis and he doesn't want to have to read, uhm, shit. "Don't submit shit," said he. "But you won't." So with that to motivate me, I might actually graduate before whatever we're doing for Summer Solstice. And then I'll be done school. I don't think I'll need to go back, and my supervisor suggested a way I could maybe even get to keep my library account after I graduate.
I guess the commonality among the above is in the huge lengths of time for which I've been working with minuscule scraps of consciousness and spare moments towards these comparatively, uhm, tiny things-- about which I am disproportionately thrilled in my deepening middle age.
Anyway, thanks for reading.