Hot and humid? Or the cold front gets here and it’s cool and humid. Either way, humid.
edit– cold. 61F and misty drizzle at 7am.
Thursday was mostly nice, with some nasty moments of humidity. I got all of my antennas back up, which meant I was up on the roof. Even in the shade, with dead calm the humidity had me dripping sweat off my nose.
I cleared some shelves and moved several bins of auction stuff out of the house and onto the shelves. I can’t have it just sit there while waiting to go to auction. I’ll take the cleaning supplies and paper goods back to my secondary location. It helped. There are 4 bins that aren’t sitting in the foyer…
I did some small things in the garage. Had to make some adjustments to the roll up door. Somehow the cables got off their guide grooves on one side and the door wasn’t closing parallel to the ground. It only took a half hour, but it’s always nerve wracking working around that spring. Slow and steady, carefully considered- that’s the way to do it.
One advantage of working on stuff is getting a much clearer idea how it really works. The first time working on the door had a bunch of discovery. This time, I saw what was wrong very quickly and just fixed it.
I had to do a bit of repair on my discone scanner antenna. Somehow during handling it I broke off two of the ‘cone’ elements. They are hollow tubes with a threaded stud inserted into one end. The stud pulled out of the tube. I couldn’t re-crimp the tube, so I silver soldered them back together. Worked well, and that’s another thing I bought far in advance of need. I have no idea where or when I got the silver solder and flux, but I knew it was exactly what would be needed to fix something. The antenna probably would still be 90% without the two elements, but it didn’t take long to fix them, and I had the stuff ready. I’ll screw them back into the antenna today or tomorrow. I’m listening to the scanner now, so some degradation didn’t make too much difference.
I finally got the feed line attached for my UHF antenna that I intend to use to D/L weather maps from the satellites. (That’s the plan anyway.) All the talk of using the SDR dongle for other things motivated me (since I was up on the roof anyway) to complete that antenna install. Now I just have to get a PC set up with the software and get the dongle running again.
I got my Instacart grocery deliveries today too. I found some cuts of beef on sale, although not the killer deal of the last couple of times. More food in the freezer makes me feel better. I added frozen fruit and vegetable mix as well as more bread. My wife is making smoothies for breakfast and likes the frozen fruit for that. Now that I have the additional freezer space, I can accommodate her. (frozen fruit is a definite luxury in prepping terms, if push comes to shove, I’ll reclaim the freezer space for meat or other protein.)
Today I’ll be doing some auction pickups. I got a bunch of household stuff, and what I believe to be an RV sized battery charger/inverter. It was $3 so worth the gamble. I also got a small Dometic camping toilet, suitable for in vehicle use and at least part of a Dakota Alert driveway monitor. There was a lot of camping stuff in the auctions this week, but I’m full up. I’m actually looking to sell several coleman lanterns and maybe a stove or two. I’m a whole lot less interested in keeping them in my “here you go, here’s a disaster kitchen” boxes than I was. My teats are running dry of the milk of human kindness at the moment.
I’ll leave you with that unfortunate image burning in your brain, and suggest that you take what time and resources you have, and keep improving your position. The easiest way is to keep stacking!
nick