Copasetic Flow

Covid has hit the house. We're all doing as well as can be expected, but as a result KD0FNR rockmite station control has moved down a floor. The Flying Rockmite is paying dividends, even grounded at the house. So! I set out bulidng a CW version of N6MTS's open headset interconnect standard  with the thought of building a better antenna-mounted 'Flying Rockmite'. Relativey though (special and general) teaches us that well, it's kinda obvious, all things are relative. Consequently, when I tested positive for COVID, after a day of being completely down, I sent out an order for a 25 foot CAT-5 Ethernet cable. It arrived today. I'm back up and around a bit, so I went up to the kitchen where the Rockmite is sitting on a table, and unplugged the short cable used in the original prototype: I plugged in the 25 foot cable to the rig, anchored the cable to the table with a copy of The Kingdom of Copper, picked up the headset/keyer, and then toodled back down to my bedroom...

Watching the behavior towards COVID and monkeypox of some of the folks that live in my home town of San Francisco, as well as our federally appointed health officials, I’m left swimming in the deep end of the pool searching for explanations. I’d rather come up with a reason that’s compassionate, something that doesn’t make my fellow American a bigotted, uncaring murderer, and frankly, lately, it’s been kind of tough to do that. We lost all our COVID mitigations months ago, masking is gone; indoor everything is back regardless of case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, or any other metric that might be tracked; institutions paid lip service to ventilation, and then mostly did nothing; and finally, they’re playing the AIDs game with Monkepox, asking us to believe that it’s only a problem for men who have sex with other men, never mind that kids and women are catching it as well. With all this input, in trying to come up with a compassionate solution regarding my peers’ complete and utter ...

 We've made a decision lately that we're going to be getting out more. Let me start this by saying however, we will always, always mask: outdoors, indoors, everywhere.  But, getting back to the topic at hand, we're going to be doing more things more often outside the house.  It's become blindingly apparent to me—and maybe it hasn’t to you, and that’s OK, and one of the topics of this post—that the medical influencers and the powers that be are never going to let this pandemic end. Since we’re still going to have to function in the world, we, as a family, made the decision we have to get back into the world. And, it’s going to be quite scary. And, it’s going to be an awful lot of fun getting back into the world. (If we don't enjoy it, why even take the associated risks right?) And this same thing is happening to lot's of people: Yes. It's now an impossible situation. And so lonely. As neither the normies who think Covid is over, nor the hardcore single/child...

The gang and I are getting ready to go camping across the Western United States. Just recently,  the bigger kids graduated to larger backpacks, so they can haul a bit more stuff, (they’ve been hauling their own tent and sleeping bags for years, but now they can take more food, water, the collected works of Elf Quest Vol. 1, and whathevs.) There was a bit of a conundrum though. Even though the gang has larger packs, it behooves one to practice with the heavier weight for a bit to get used to it, but there’s a pandemic, and therein lied the rub.  The pandemic has—perhaps paradoxically—actually thinned out the number of camping trips we take each year. You’d think out in a forest would be better during a pandemic right? I agree, but our camping route, no matter how we’ve tried it so far always involves a bus ride for the last leg. Even if we walk to the ferry terminal in downtown San Francisco, even if we take the ferry—where we sit outside—across the bay rather than the bus over...

Let me preface this by saying I’m in no way an expert on anything medical.  So, if you came here for anything actually related to the virus, now would be the time to move on. Instead, I’ll be talking about talking to kids.  I’m not a trained expert there either, but—as a dad—I do it a lot with the 9, 7, and 5 year-old kids here: Daize, Towser, and Tawnse respectively, (all aliases). Why do I bring the virus up at all?  Shit happens.  We went to an author’s talk a few days ago where the first question an audience member brought up was the virus.  Yesterday, Daize and I walked into one grocery store in the midst of a run and rode by another grocery with cars lined up down the block waiting in line to park.  (Thank you so much SFMTA driver who opened your doors and let us hop back out of that area!  Public transit rocks!)  The gang and I talk about things as they come up, so guess what?  With all the local happenings we’ve talked about C...