They’re doing yoga on Mondays now and that means I’ve discovered a new hell. I’ve mentioned that I clean up at the gym after the last class, but Monday yoga is at the time I’m cleaning up. That means they crank the heat up and they play yoga music. My new hell is mopping in the heat while listening to new age hippie yoga music. (Yeah, I already know that I can use my iPhone earbuds to fix most of that problem.)

Speaking of hell, my W2 arrived so I have to start doing my taxes.

So my second train-derailment-delayed package arrived today with what I think is no problems. The shipment arrived fine, but it appears to be missing items just like the other shipment. There’s not mounting hardware (six feet, thirty lag bolts, and tar strips). Ah well, the rain will keep me off my roof for a while so I can wait.

I spent the weekend playing the geekiest game ever. it’s called Morse Runner and simulates a ham radio contest where you try to make as many contacts as possible. It sounds just like you’re on the radio and it sends all the information in Morse code. I suppose in this day and age, if you have a computer running there’s no reason to decode the Morse code on your own, but it is a game after all and why cheat?

I had to miss going to the gym this morning because I was waiting for 1-866-Junkway to show up and haul off all the crap from the basement flood. It was nice getting all that crap out of my hair. Now I have to decide if I’m going to do anything else in the basement to either avoid repeated flooding or just get the crap off of the floor for when it does flood again. I’m not all the clear on what I should do here.

I stayed home Friday to deal with the flooded basement. Of course, I wanted to avoid that so I ended up writing my yearly self-assessment which I had been putting off. So the flooding actually did some good, in a way, by getting me to do something I needed to do which I was avoiding.

The other thing I did today was see a reading of a musical play written by two high school kids. It was a work in progress and certainly a little rocky in places, but my friend Melissa did a great job singing and the whole thing was surprisingly entertaining. I’d definitely say it was worth my time to see “Fight Call.”

There are people who have real troubles and I would feel bad about complaining, but this is a blog that usually gets 10-20 hits a day, which means to me that both of my friends and several of my enemies come by to see what I’m kvetching about today. Yesterday I complained about two packages being delayed because of a train derailment and I got 944 hits. I’m hoping the people who are here looking for information on the train derailment just look at that post and move along.

It’s flooding in Oregon and my basement flooded for the first time in years. I was about to move all the boxes in the living room down to the basement and I’m glad I held off. This is small potatoes compared to the people dying or losing their homes because of the rain, but this is my blog that should only have 10-20 hits per day (as I said) and it’s my place to complain.

In any case, I decided everything that was on the bottom level of boxes was going into the trash, with only a couple of exceptions. The brand-new chop saw was taken out of the box and put up to dry. Some wet photo albums as well. Most everything else (including some Tyco model trains that I was sure I was going to put on ebay some day) are now in the trash. And really, I’ve been sitting around wondering when I’d get around to looking at all the crap in the boxes and it’s time to just get rid of the stuff that I haven’t looked at in years. I could be out dozens of dollars!

Water is still collecting in the basement. I used my Wet/Dry vacuum to get up a lot of the water and it just seeped back in. It’s going to be a damp mess down there for a while.

I’ve been buying a lot of weird crap on the intarwebs (ham radio crap, obviously) and I’ve spent a lot of time using “Delivery Status” on my iPhone to track the packages. I had a bunch of antenna stuff coming on Friday but I got an interesting message email from UPS that said,

That’s kind of exciting in a bad way. Delivery Status even reports the location of the train derailment to be Wolf Point, MT, which means I can use the intarwebs to get news. The AP reports:

I hate to be mercenary about this but I think this may be one of those times that I have to be present when the shipment arrives and check to see that it’s not all beat up. I think the only thing I can do is reject the shipment when the guy arrives with it. I don’t think this had anything to do with the snow.

Speaking of snow, there were people sledding at midnight, and sledding means lots of screaming, “Whee,” and using other nonsensical interjections that woke me up repeatedly. When I got up at 6AM there was still a lot of snow, but it was raining cats and dogs. I drove to the slush to work, and got there at the usual time but was unusually tired. I hope we’re done with that foolishness.

[UPDATE] For all those people coming here looking for UPS info, my package is back on schedule to be delivered today, 1/20. That means I have to take a day off of work to wait for it, and reject it if it looks damaged. At least that’s how I understand how shipping works.

[Second UPDATE] I got one of my two packages delivered today and it was fine. True to MFJ form, though, (the ham radio manufacturer also known as “More Effing Junk”) it came without a manual. Oh, and I’m deleting the ruder comments because it’s my blog and I do whatever I feel like.

It snows a bit in Portland and it’s pretty miserable when it does. Most often we’ll get enough snow that there’s white bits in the grass but nothing more. The worst is when we get a few inches of snow, it melts to slush during the day and then freezes to a sheet of ice during the night. There’s no getting around in the ice, no matter what people tell you about their winter driving prowess. The weather forecasters are generally useless when there’s snow predicted and I was watching the dire predictions when the snow actually started to stick to my satellite dish and killed my TV reception. Oh, well. We now have snow.

Today’s morning commute wasn’t so bad. The snow was slush and most traveled roads weren’t slick at all. We’ll see how it its tomorrow morning. If I’m lucky, the rain will start early and the snow will all be gone tomorrow morning.

It took a couple days of searching through all the boxes in the living room and basement, but I found my radio and my power supply. My antenna and a tripod should be arriving on Friday and I may even get to put it all up this weekend. So very geeky. I’ve been on the radio a few times and a co-worker even heard me at some point. I’m not sure what this all means other than my cave-dwelling radio geek days are getting closer and closer.

I even skipped going to the gym. The real reason is that I had shoulder cramping, a headache, and I’m old. I did NOT feel like I’d be doing all that much even if I went, so I didn’t. It gave me more time to search for my radio, though.

I spent a lot of time this weekend trying to reconcile my accounts in Quicken Essentials. I went back to my bank records from 2000 and looked at them month-by-month. By the time I got to 2011, something had changed and everything was back to normal. I’m not sure what I did and I’m most ly convinced that the software is just plain buggy. That was most of my Friday evening and Saturday.

I got a call from the urologist on Friday and found out that he didn’t find anything, which is what I wanted him to find and he really didn’t need to stick things in my privates to get there, but I guess he had to make sure.

Other than that there isn’t all that much a guy does during the NFL playoffs besides watching a lot of football.

I’m being very un-hamlike, spending a lot of money on radio gear. In fact, I’ve even bought the wrong accessories for my new handheld radio and it only made me go out and buy the correct ones. I figure I’ve been doing this since, what, 1978, so it’s not like it’s a whim. I have found out several things from my new Yaesu VX-8R radio.

1. It’s hard to use but the instruction booklet tells you exactly how to do more than you ever would need to do (unlike the Chinese POS).
2. I can listen to all sorts of things like aircraft but I need a better antenna.
3. There ain’t no one talking on the ham radio.

I still have to admit that the Chinese POS got me interested in radio again.

I’m really just waiting for my new antenna to arrive so I can get back on the low bands and talk to all sorts of odd exotic locations. I have to buy more cable, and I have to find where I packed my radio away. Hooray for geeky hobbies!

DON’T READ THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE SUBJECT IN THE TITLE.

So, this isn’t the most pleasant thing to read about, I’m sure, but I just wanted to see if I can get this into the google search results and say, it wasn’t as painful as the rest of the intarwebs made it out to be. The worst part was insertion of the probe which felt, well, larger than was comfortable. The numbing of the prostate with lidocaine was only a warm sensation and the actual biopsies felt uncomfortable but weren’t that painful for me. Sitting was uncomfortable for a couple hours afterwards (like while I was driving myself home) but it got better fairly quickly. I only had to lie down and read a chapter of the Steve Jobs biography before I was mostly back to normal.

The worst part was finding blood in my bodily fluids. They warn you that you may see blood in your stool and urine, but they didn’t tell me that even after knowing it would happen that actually seeing it would make me feel a little panicky.

I guess I was a bit of a smartass about the whole thing. A nurse and an ultrasound tech both asked my name, birthdate, and if I knew what I was having done. I replied with my name, my birthdate, and that “the doctor is going to shove something big up my ass and stick pins in my prostate.” I also told them that I searched the intarwebs and they had one opinion (“the most painful thing that could happen to you”) which is not what the doctor indicated. Once again, the intarwebs were wrong.

In any case, I got the biopsy because of a slightly elevated PSA test. Not dangerously high, but it was higher than normal for an Asian male in his 40’s. Since my dad had prostate cancer, my doctor wanted to do a biopsy. Since I trust him (he’s geeky like me) I went in for the biopsy. And that’s my story. Results come later.

I spent most of the weekend sorting through QSL cards. Those are postcards that you send after you talk to a guy on the radio, to confirm that you talked to him. The cards can be colorful or just plain boring, depending on who is sending them. I was just checking to make sure my computer records matched the actual cards I had. My geeky hobby has progressed to the postal service, not just radio.

I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out why my email is sometimes broken. kickstarter, for example, is violating some internet rules regarding DNS, but that shouldn’t keep me from getting email from them. Unfortunately, I have to call in some help on this one. I’m not sure what all is broken.

So there you go. More geekery over the weekend. I need a vacation from my weekend.

My name is Todd and I am a ham radio operator. It’s been two days since I’ve been on the radio.

For about ten years I’ve volunteered during the Portland Marathon as communications at an aid station. I used to have a handheld radio that I only used for that, but it was stolen during a break-in a few years ago. Since that time I’ve been borrowing my buddy Greg’s radio every year. Every year I think about buying my own radio, but I only really use it once a year.

About a month back I was talking about this and an old friend gave me a brand new Chinese-built dual-band ham radio. What a pile of shit. Honestly, the radio is shit, the manual is shit, the shitty thing talks to me in Chinese, and you can’t even set it up without the shitty Chinese software. The settings are all in Chinglish and are incomprehensible and if you select the wrong thing the radio won’t work. It took hours and hours of trial-and-error to get it actually function as a normal radio. I spent $80 on accessories and I’ve had fantasies about hitting this thing with a large hammer until it was  a pile of Chinese dust. I really don’t even want to give it away because anyone I hate someone enough to give this shit radio to is someone I’m not talking to.

On the plus side, all the frustration from this Chinese POS has got me interested in radio again. I spent $1200 on ham radio equipment the other day. I bought a Japanese-designed Yaesu handheld radio with a bunch of accessories. I also bought an HF antenna that I’m planning to put on the roof so I can start talking to other countries again. I even downloaded a bunch of Morse code training software.

I’m old now and women were never interested even when I was younger, so I’m going to buy some pants with a waistline that comes up to my nipples, change to a nice comb-over hairstyle, and get back into ham radio 100% in 2012. Cool plan, right?

I’m hoping my mom doesn’t get sick as badly as I did but so far she seems a lot better off than I was when I got the crud. She slept all day but didn’t have a fever and seemed fairly good otherwise. It also gave me an excuse to take a day off from the gym, which is something I should have had the sense to do anyway. Ease my way back in rather than try to kill myself right off. I did have the ‘flu after all. I felt kind of logy all day long.

I may have done it to myself by staying up too late and by eating “loco moco” for lunch. I kept hearing about it on Hawaii Five-O so I had to try it. A bunch of rice topped by two burger patties, a fried egg on each, covered in gravy. All the big eaters who usually go double what I do stopped halfway through but I hoovered my  whole lunch. My stomach felt kind of strange but I’m not sure it was because of the food since I felt bad even earlier. I think it’s the coffee at work and the mind control drugs contained therein. Actually, they probably don’t wash the sludge out properly, but it’s more interesting to think of conspiracies sometimes.