OK now I'm scared. I can't find the info on the last oil change on the Jeep. Is it possible I didn't change it at all last year? That would be horrible, at least by time. I've only put 5000 miles on the Jeep in the last ~2 years so if I've only changed it once I'm OK on mileage but really, really off based on time. How could I forget something like that? Grepping previous journals doesn't turn up anything in 2010 but I'm also getting lazy about writing stuff like that down (or maybe it's just not that interesting anymore). In any case I'll just make sure to change it next weekend and be sure to write it down.

yesterday I went to the doctor for a physical. I think the last one was in 1991 before I went off to college, I remember it being some sort of requirement. The woman has been on my case about getting checked out since I'm having trouble sleeping and am exhibiting signs of depression (in her professional opinion). She wants to rule out something wrong with my physically first, then have me do one of those sleep studies to check out sleeping issues and then if that's not it to think about meds. That exactly what the real doctor suggested as well. I think there is some collusion going on.

The whole physical would have been a non-event except for the blood work and the vaccine. The doc wanted to update my tetanus stuff even though I had an update 5-6 years ago before the India trip, and of course they had to draw a bunch of blood to do all the various tests for cholesterol and uh, whatever else it is they look for. I was doing fine with the blood draw until the guy finished. As soon as he said "you're done" and took the tube off my arm I started to black out. WTF? Why after it was all over? I started getting seriously bad tunnel vision, fell back down into the chair and felt like puking, which ultimately would have sucked since I was unable to move. The tech got the chair reclined and got my feet up and managed to hand me a can of OJ before I was completely out. Took me a while to recover and get to where I could walk but I was still pasty white and sweating for another 30-45 minutes.

Why are so many people walking around the lobby all happy looking? I've been sitting here 20 minutes working on email and this update and tons of people are walking around all smug and happy looking. Friday? Is there a beer bash today? What's with all the joy?

I've got to pack my radio and whatnot up tonight and get ready to fly to SEA tomorrow. It will be fun to see Kenny and Dennis again but I really wish the trip was next weekend. I could use a weekend of just sitting around, I'm really tired.

Cooking class the other night sucked, we didn't get to cook at all as he just did a demo. I understand him having to make the vegetable stock ahead of time since it takes a few hours to get done but we could have brazed our own beef and whipped up the risotto. As it was his beef was too salty (he loves his salt) and the risotto was under cooked. The woman could easily have done better as risotto is already one of her signature dishes.

I also seem to have left out the fact that last weekend, or I think it was last weekend, that we went to a home show. Checking out kitchens and bathroom ideas was fun, but it's forcing the woman to try to come to grips with our move or not move situation. We either sell the house and move into an apartment until we find a new house, or we give up on finding anything we like and just fix up the bathroom and replace the kitchen counter in the current house.

Damn, a week without an update. I thought I had been keeping up but it turns out I've just been thinking about what I wanted to write but haven't actually been writing it down. I need some sort of ESP controlled keyboard apparently.

Last night the woman and I went to a wine bar in Fremont (in a strip mall, very klassy). Although the outside is pretty bogus, the inside is really nice. It's small and quiet with patrons in the 40-50 range. Not a single skinny jeans/messenger bag sporting hipster to be found. Perfect. They were having a tasting by Frog's Tooth Winery and while most of their wines were just OK, they had a Malbec that the server described as 'so smokey it's like licking a camp fire'. The woman didn't like it, but I really did. Very unique taste. We bought a bottle even though I know when I open it I'll be the only person who likes it. Keeps other people out of my stash. :)

The HAM moment of last night was checking into the weekly net. The woman didn't want to sit around the house waiting for check-in time before we went to the wine thing so I took my HT and my emergency jpole antenna. Before we went into the bar I managed to check in using the jpole on the end of a stick standing in the parking lot. It really does work, with the HT's regular antenna they couldn't hear me, they just reported "some station making scratching sounds" but with the jpole up I had no problems hitting the repeater. Amazing what antennas do. It was also actually fun to do, I've done more talking last night on the radio in that parking lot than I have in the last few months of check-ins. I think that's what I'm going to like about this hobby, not doing big stationary installs but rather doing field days and moving around trying to do stuff from random temporary locations. I kinda knew that since all the radios I've been looking at I've been dreaming of putting them in a backpack with a battery and walking to the park but last night just solidified it a bit.

Cooking class was good last week, and the last class is tonight. He's doing a cheese tasting in the middle of class since we're doing some brazing tonight and that takes forever.

Time to walk to IL6 for my first meeting of the day. Oy.

Took the day off yesterday as a 'mental health day' and went up to the city to have lunch with the woman. It was a really nice day for a ride, 65F, sunny and traffic was reasonable. I found parking not too terribly far from her building and we went to a local Chinese place (with pretty good fried rice) then walked to the Ferry Building to check out the farmer's market and all the specialty shops. It's rich foodie mecca, so while we could identify with the quality the prices were out of budget.

While up there I stopped by TAD gear to say hi to some of the psycho kids. Gianni was there, but Brett was off at the SHOT show and John was actually working at his real job and wasn't available. Humph. Outside their shop I saw this sign, sorta puts a damper on my 'live in a van and the world is your front door' scheme.

Way too much cooking multi-tasking going on. We have a marinara going on the left (based on what we made in class but instead of oil I used the reduced fat from the ground lamb I browned to go in it), a hand made spaetzle with onions and ham on the right, muffins are in the oven and on the back board is the prepped lamb rack with the rest of the chopped herbs to go into my sauce when the time is right. That's about 3 hours worth of cooking going on, but it's dinner for tonight, breakfast muffins for the week and at lunches for the week for me. Maybe I'll just bring sauce in and get some plain pasta at the cafe so I don't have to pre-cook and nuke pasta. :) Not shown are the peas and mashed potatoes the woman cooked up after I took the pics. Gotta have sides with the lamb.

We looked at several houses today and one yesterday, and although the lots are nice the houses are pretty crappy. I'm not spending $600k on a house only to have to dump another $100k in it to make it not suck, and even then some of the floor plans are crap still. These were the best of the ones we found on-line, and that's depressing. After looking at those we came home to ours and we (or I) realized how nice it is with high ceilings, the reasonable closets, the not-beat-to-crap exterior, etc.

Even with the house idea starting to die, I still kept up the packing. I've got all my books packed, and most of the den, computer junk, loading stuff and part of the garage boxed up. Maybe I went a little too far.... not everything has to go in a box.

A pic just for Kenny, it's how the 'radio room' is shaping up. What you don't see is all the nasty coax runs off to the left off that switcher. I tried to catch it in mid-transmit on the packet stuff and it looks like I did, but the SWR meter isn't quite up to where it fully goes yet. Just imagine it a little higher.

Last night we went to Station 1 again, only this time we took my parents for their giftmas present dinner. Food was pretty good again, I didn't take any pictures other than of the wine bottle from the stuff that was pretty good. It's local so I'm going to ride up there at some point and see if they have any of that 2006 we had last night still in stock.

Wednesday was our first cooking class (of 3) with that chef AJ guy we had the class with last year. This class is about northern Italian cuisine. Our first dish was pretty simple, breded and baked chicken with pasta and a marinara sauce, but the twist was that we couldn't measure or time anything. We had to 'feel' the chicken to see if it was done and taste the noodles. The marinara took over an hour to make so we just used his pot of sample stuff he had made while we watched but the rest we did on our own. It doesn't look very spiffy but man was it good. That sauce was so easy to make, and now we can sound like chefs talking about making mirepoix. Doing it again I would skip the chicken and just put ground beef in the sauce, but I'm sure that's some sort of Italian no-no. Here is a pic of AJ and of our final dish.

How long before I stop writing the times and dates in German? I hardly notice it anymore which is interesting, but I don't exactly remember anything else in German. No trips planned any time soon so it's not the most useful of things to remember. I did just book 5 more Austin trips for the next 5 months, so at least I know where I'll be flying for the first half of the year. I got the same flights and the same seats on the same flights. I should make some sort of mark on the seats to see if I end up flying in the same plane too. :)

I made these last week but forgot to upload the pic. The hamsters needed some new huts (they get stinky after a while) so I used some cardboard scraps to make up a few for the woman. They really like the half-cylinder one but hate the other. Who knew hamsters were so particular about their lodging? They're rodents after all. Rodents!

Maggie (one of the people who works in space planning next to us) went to Australia and I asked her to pick me up a box of wine. Apparently they're big on box wine there, they actually sell good wine in boxes under the guise of being environmentally friendly. This specimen cost me $12 USD and it's actually pretty good. It says 'fine tannins' but what it really should say is 'tannins that are like a knife in the back', but I like that finish in a heavy red. Look at me, talking like a wine snob.

Last night I turned on the radio and worked it for about 15 minutes and heard all sorts of traffic from guys down in Arizona. Amazingly clear signals, really loud and with my new found DSP skills there was minimal background noise. I told Kenny it was like they were on 2m FM on the next block the sound quality was that good. They jabbered on and on and on and I never got a chance to break in to even see if they could hear me. They were running some huge antennas with 15 verticals and 300W. They were hearing people in Hawaii running 100W so I had a chance, if they would have ever stopped talking. I'll listen in again tonight and see if I get the same propagation.

Spent more quality time crawling around in the attic this weekend getting a real 10m dipole strung up (which doesn't work at all for some reason) as well as getting the 20m and 40m hamstick setups in there. Kenny and I tried to talk to each other on Sunday night with absolutely no success. I did hear some guy in Alaska and this morning I heard a guy in Arizona but otherwise it's mostly just static.

All of these failures are getting annoying (and expensive as I try various combinations of parts trying to find the magic setup that will work) but I guess I am learning a lot about antennas and whatnot. Also while digging into the radio manual some more I learned that my unit has the DSP unit in there (now stock on all US sold 718s apparently) so I've got a lot more choices in noise reduction and filtering. I can make random static quieter! Woo!

Outside of the radio realm, or perhaps because of it, the woman and I have started toying around with the idea of finding a new house. The townhouse is OK, but it would be nice to have a real garden, and to have at least a driveway for the woman to park in (since I'll still get both garage slots) and perhaps have a layout that's smaller yet more useful. With interest rates low we can get a lot more house for the same money, especially since we can't refinance the townhouse. Finding a small house on a large lot is going to be hard, if the lot is big they stuff a huge house on it nullifying the effect of the large lot. There are lots of small house/big lot combos in the Willow Glen area but that's too far away from BART and caltrain is a disaster a lot of the time so the woman ruled that out.

Sitting in a meeting I really don't want to be in anymore, listening to people who really shouldn't be employed at any level above bag boy trying to tell us how things work. Sometimes I worry about my job, then I realize that if these people can somehow continue to work then I should be fine even if I have to find new employment. Guess I should try to pay attention somewhat....

Made it back from Austin, we had some issues but got through them and actually finished a day ahead of schedule. No one could get earlier flights back so we all just ended up wasting time in various ways. I went to a local ham store and got a hamstick dipole adapter (more on that later) and then caught up with everyone after lunch to go see True Grit. I liked the movie, although some of the scenes they had in it weren't in the original but were in other Rooster Cogburn movies. Unlike what I remember at other movies, they didn't have this one turned up so loud... or I'm just getting really deaf. Had trouble following the dialog in places which didn't used to happen. They also didn't play all those THX and other trailers in the beginning, guess the Tinseltown 17 in Austin isn't that modern.

Scott and Lina came by last night for new years. The woman made 8 different appetizers and we had those and a few different wines. We played a board game called 'foodies' (which we won) and they left around 11 to get to Lina's parents for the actual midnight festivities. We watched TV until 12:10, realized we missed the whole thing (the wonder of DVRs) and went to bed.

Today I set on on my mission to wire some HF antennas up. My trip to the ham hut yesterday yielded me some 20m and 40m ham sticks, an antenna tuner, coax switchbox, cables and an assortment of connectors. Unfortunately they didn't have any hamstick dipole adapters in stock so I was left using the one I got in Texas... but then the woman reminded me that the furnace guys are coming on Wednesday so I had best not have any antennas up there in the way. Sigh.

With the dipoles on hold (after I made an emergency trip to Fry's to replace my soldering iron which crapped out trying to solder the heavy connectors) I moved on to the random wire project. As you can see from these pictures our attic space isn't that tall, just large enough to stuff a furnace in at 3' high at the peak. It took me at least a solid hour if not more of crawling around getting poked by roofing staples and banging my head to get 70' of wire run around the perimeter of the attic. It's terminated at my ghetto wooden binding post block inside the closet in the den. You can't see that post or the hole unless you step inside the closet and look up so the woman was OK with it. I'm going to get a power outlet face plate to cover that hole and still let the wires through.

With the wire up I need to learn to use the tuner and my 'artificial ground'. Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get to hear someone on the radio. With the hamstick dipole laying on the ground in the hallway I did hear a few people but with the un-tuned random wire I get nada. I won't get discouraged yet.

With only the one power supply I had to move the 2m radio upstairs as well which means that my packet setup had to move. It took me about 3 minutes to get VMware player installed and after scp-ing my packet XP vm over to the laptop things just fired right up. Way, way easier than getting old VMware 2.0 working under linux. Sometimes Windows just works better (or at least easier). The crusty dell laptop isn't the best but it easily will run this one vm and the other radio software I'll be getting as soon as I get the right cables for the 718.