[no running since Wednesday]
My wife went to a local running race last Saturday. I wasn’t there, I was doing the airplane travel thing. She ran into a friend who had come alone, her husband was at home with Covid.
Sunday we went to church and out to eat and then to Wal-Mart for our groceries. Monday evening we went to the MSU vs LSU women’s basketball game where MSU won.
Along about Wednesday she started to feel a bit under the weather. It didn’t hit me until Thursday evening. She took a Covid test and she was positive. (I took one today but I think I muffed the procedure so I’ll call it inconclusive… but I’ve got the same symptoms.)
We both are vaxed and boosted up to our eyeballs.
So Friday I was able to get in pretty much a full day of work. I kind of faded off at the end of the day.
Today it has mostly been: take naps, take ibuprofen or tylenol, and poke at the phone and watch TV.
Here it is 7:30 pm and I hope to have this done and turn off the light before 8.
I made myself some toast and tea for lunch… actually we have been nibbling and sipping all day. But yesterday was my Grandma H’s birthday (I think she would be about 110 years old now). And for my sickly condition I made toast with the bread cut into three vertical strips. She used to do it that way when I didn’t feel well.
Early in the day I worked a bit on the Aerostar. I wanted to see if I could get it running and get some idea whether I want to spend the money to get the exhaust fixed.
There is a shaped plastic tube from the air cleaner to the intake throttle body. On this car that tube has a bunch of holes worn in it. I was able to get it to run, but not very well. I took the tube off and that also involved disconnecting the air mass sensor which measures the amount of air coming from the air filter. With that stuff removed it fired right up and ran pretty well. A lot of air was coming in via the holes and that air didn’t go through the sensor. With the sensor unplugged it probably is using some kind of fallback dumb-default condition.
So, yes, if I sort out the intake tube and then the exhaust, I think it will run fine. I’m pretty happy about that.
Oh, I also got a license plate for it this week. Very inexpensive. I didn’t splurge to get the antique plates because I wasn’t sure how long I would be keeping it.
Another thing I did this week was put up my G5RV antenna. I think it was Wednesday evening when I climbed the tower and put one end of my rope through the pulley up there. Then Thursday morning I was able to get the antenna stretched out and up in the air a bit. It’s not the best but it is more than I’ve had since we moved back from Dubuque.
I have a digital receiver, which is connected to a Raspberry Pi single board computer. It feeds packets over the network to my regular laptop and a radio listening program called Cubic. So I played around with that on Thursday and some on Friday.
My big thing was always morse code. I really liked it. But over time my hearing was causing trouble and listening to morse code would increase my tinnitus. And just the little bit of listening I did this week… I saw that situation has not improved. It could also be part of the illness nonsense going on in my ears, nose and throat. All I can say for sure is that I enjoyed listening a bit but it was difficult and I didn’t want to turn up the volume.
So I don’t know what I’m going to do.
I still find it interesting that some small perturbation of electro-magnetic energy can be detected thousands of miles away almost instantaneously. And I miss participating in that.
In other radio news, today was the annual Jackson, MS hamfest and I had planned to take some stuff down there to sell. But of course I didn’t go.
We’re going to stay home from church tomorrow and watch the service live stream on YouTube.
Our son, bless his heart, made us some food and drove up from Meridian to deliver it this afternoon. This is the same guy who dropped everything he was doing and drove up to the Knoxville, TN area where we were at yet another race event, but I had crashed the car and we were ok but discombobulated. He came up and the race happened and he helped us get home. When was that? I think it was two years ago.