Waiting for the rain.

September is the best month, statistically, in Oregon but this year it’s been a bit dreary. And I welcome the dreariness. You might wonder why I’m waiting for the end of summer when the next thing is nine months of rain, but I’m an Oregonian and the heat and I don’t get along. That’s only the partial truth and most of my complaints are about the m*th*rf*ck*ng birds going into the m*th*rf*ck*ng chimney at the school across the street. The birds poop all over my car and … wait, I no longer have a fancy car. Poop on my Prius isn’t so bad. The truth is, 4000 birds attract 20000 people (not on the same day) and that gets to be a huge pain in the ass.

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It’s actually not that bad if I leave for the gym while they’re all here and get back after they leave, but who wants to plan everything around a bunch of people hanging around the neighborhood?

Today was National Cheeseburger Day! $1 burgers at Ringside! Two for one Tillamook Cheeseburgers at Burgerville! What did I have for lunch? A teriyaki chicken sandwich. And for dinner? Natto (the fermented beans that smell like a mop bucket and are slimy and gross but taste pretty good). I figured it was amateur hour and skipped it just like I skipped burger week. In fact, I was at Pause during burger week and I had a pork chop instead of their $5 burger special! That showed ‘em. (Whoever ‘em is.)

Wayne Green, R.I.P.

This is sad ham radio geek news but Wayne Green (who started a bunch of magazines I read as a teenager) just passed away at 91. Yeah, I’m not talking about pr0n, but totally geeky stuff like 73, Byte, Kilobaud, and other very nerdy magazines. I saw him once at the ARRL National Convention in Seattle in 1980. In fact, when I was at the VICA National Skill Olympics in 1981, my buddy Roger and I had code words set up so I could make a collect call to tell him if I won or not. The code word for #1 (which I actually pulled off!) was “Wayne Green”. It’s been a long time since I thought about Wayne, and he’d gotten a bit wacky, but he will be missed.

I just had drinks with my buddy Il and his wife Anna. I got a last-minute text from them and I figured that the new parents probably had a grandparent give them a date night out. They wanted to have a quick drink and so I went to hung out for a while. Three drinks cost me more than dinner, but it was worth it, of course. They still seem more excited than overwhelmed and that’s a good way to be.

The only other excitement today was that I got to use my new lawnmower on my new lawn, and that my mom and I got ‘flu shots. Only trivalent and not quadravalent, but you get what you can get.