"Flower" has a name and a face...

Pam and I were blessed with a new granddaughter a couple of weeks ago...our first.  Miss Vivian Macy Bennett has taken center stage and is now ready to steal the show.  Formerly known as "Flower," she is finally here, and although we have not yet met her, we will fix that soon enough.  She will open a whole new chapter in the lives of her parents, Pam and me and Randy and Margret. 

In a family rich with boys, some of us (namely me) are going into this now knowing a thing about baby girls.  This one will be played pretty much by ear -- not sure if wrestling on the living room floor will do.  I do, however, hope she will learn something about fishing from her grandpa (or whatever she calls me).

So, this is Miss Vivian.  We can't wait to meet her and formally introduce ourselves.  I'll fill you all in on the details later.  Until then, sleep well Miss V.(a.k.a Flower).

There's nothing like a grandchild to put a smile on your face, a lump in your throat, and a warm feeling in your heart.  (Annon.)

Hooah

Man Trip 2015...

After a terrible winter, two good things came about this past week: 

First, the ice finally melted on the pond and there was no fish kill this year.  Yeaaaaaahhhhhhh !!  Maybe the fact that all of the fish were only 6-8 inches long when the ice first covered the pond might have helped them survive.  But I'm thinking that maybe all those times I went out to cut holes in the ice might have paid off.  That's what I'm telling myself and all the neighbors who thought I was half crazy all winter with that chain saw out there.

The second thing is that it was finally time for the Man Trip, our annual pilgrimage to the Carolinas to find some warm weather and green (or brown) grass where we could take out our housebound frustrations on a golf course. Every year about this time I am reminded of a quote I once used in an entry:  Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick. (P.J. O'Rourke).  

A lot of people say I could have taken daily walks this winter for a lot less money and still accomplished the same thing.  But I would invite them to stop by the windy plains of McCartyville to check out the winds and snowstorms. I know -- I'm a wimp.
 
Also, there was something new this year.  We went back to the Smoky Mountain Country Club in Whittier, NC, but we had 8 players this year.  A little more coordination, but it was really fun.

(L-R) Mike, Larry, Dave, Chuck

(L-R) Dave, Larry, Jerry, Stan

One of the other neat things we do is our mid-trip cook out.  We have steaks, baked potatoes, salad, a vegetable, a dessert and some drinks.  The food was great, but the three stores we check with had no baked pies!!  Boy did I take heat for not having a dessert.  Oh well, maybe next year we'll have two.

Pretty good looking spread.

One of the reasons we like this trip is that it's like taking our golf game on the road, kinda like spring training.  Nobody plays all that well (generally) and nobody really cares (generally).  It's just good to go whack that little ball and get away from the cold of Ohio.  And even though it was pretty cold and rainy on our last day there, we managed to tough it out for nine holes at a very nice course.  

So now it's back to our regular courses and familiar shots.  We travel some to other courses in Ohio, so we don't always play the same course.  I am also renewing my pledge to play every state park golf course in Ohio.  Sounds like another series of mini-road trips.  I'll have to see who's up for that!

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive. (Arnold Palmer)

Hooah

Enjoying a little hobby time...

I have been a ham radio operator for some time now, almost 26 years, and enjoy tinkering with things associated with amateur radio operations.  I'm not all that good at it -- not like some of those old guys who haunt the aisles of flea markets and hamventions looking for chips, gadgets and gizzmos. And while I don't have a beanie with a helicopter rotor or a small radio antenna on top, I do take the hobby pretty seriously.  As an active member of the Shelby County Amateur Radio Emergency Services (S.C.A.R.E.S.) club, I enjoy working various "contests," field days and various civic-related activities with other club members.  I also serve as the training officer for our club.  That doesn't mean that I am the go-to guy in our club -- far from it.  There are some really smart guys associated with our group.  But I do what I can.

So it was a welcome relief that when we put together our training schedule for the year, one of the members suggested that we look into NVIS antennas.  I thought the description of this antenna sounded familiar, so I spent a little bit of time looking it up and found out that it is really the civilian name for the kind of antennas we had in our signal cage in the Army.  Go figure.  Well, I made the rounds of some old Army contacts to see if I could get one of these via the surplus markets, but didn't have any luck  Seems the Army is still using them.  I would have thought that they were out of the system by now. 

Anyway, I studied the diagram provided in an old Field Manual and told myself that I could build one of these pretty easily.  Now if it worked --- well, that would be another story.  I found some modern parts on line and made a couple of trips to the hardware store, and then spent the afternoon in the garage today  putting this together (it was actually warm enough out there that I didn't need the propane heaters).  Well, sorta together.  I am conducting training on this antenna in April so I kinda pre-assembled it.  We'll still have some things to do in April, and we'll still have to hook everything up and get it tuned.  Our goal is to use this antenna for the Ohio State Parks on the Air Contest in August.

I made some tweaks to the diagram and think this really came out pretty good.  This antenna is designed to be only 15' off the ground and looks like a teepee.  But, it can also be strung across some 3' high traffic cones or strung up in a tree and still work.  We will probably experiment with a couple of these applications to see what we can get.

I know it is hard to see much here, but I will take more pictures when we train in April so you'll get a better look at it.  Stay tuned.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.(Unknown)

Hooah

You just might have something there...

Anyone who has weathered the snows in Ohio (I know, I know, it was much worse in Boston...) has probably had to watch the slow death by melting that has taken place along your driveways, sidewalks, local mall parking lots, and maybe across the broad expanse of fairways and greens on your favorite golf course. The first ones are just a part of the season and will happen regardless of what we want.  However, the melting of snow and ice on golf course greens and fairways gives us hope, a renewed sense of a better life ahead.

And even though it seems that this melting takes its good old time to be completed, and the ground takes its good old time thawing more than an inch deep so all this water can be soaked up, it seems that there will always be hold out areas that just seem to take longer to get with it.  Well, such a place is my driveway area and the culvert pipe that goes under the driveway.  It seems that snow lasts there longer than anywhere else.  It also freezes more there blocking the natural flow of water from my neighbor's yard to our pond. 

I tried to take the spud bar (I think you have to be from a rural area to know what a spud bar is.) and break out the ice, but the backed up water was too deep and I really didn't want to get soaked in such a futile attempt.  But I had to do something -- the water was clear down to my neighbor's driveway, and almost up to his house (this picture doesn't show how bad the water was backed up).  His front yard looked more like a pond than my pond does (which, by the way, is still ice covered !!!).

I kinda screwed up and didn't take the pictures at the beginning of my adventure.  But the water was clear back to his mailbox (across from the small pine) and covered the grass all the way up to his trees on the left.  I was worried that the grass would all suffocate and his whole yard would be browned out.  So, I tried another approach.  Didn't know if it would work, but thought it should.

I got my back-up sump pump out of the basement and took it out to the water. There is a deep area near my culvert so the water will naturally pool up there and it gave me a place to put the pump so it would be submerged.

This worked pretty well.  I used it for a while and then took it out and checked for any grass or "stuff" it might have sucked up into the bottom of the pump.  I took part of the pump hose across the driveway and shot out the water thru my yard down toward the pond.

Those of you who live in the country know that we usually have drop-offs  from the roads to our yards and then the yards usually grade back up toward the house so the water will run away from the foundations.  So natural waterways are common.  However, it seems that if one neighbor clogs up the system, everything gets out of synch.  So I was not surprised when a couple of the other guys down the road stopped and looked at what I was doing.  I was even less surprised when I saw them using their pump system to clear out their "yardponds."

If nothing else, I did discover something in my system -- I had a small hole in one of the flex hoses.  Glad I noticed this now instead of later when it might have been shooting water where it could have done some damage.

I have always said that having the right tool makes all the difference.  I could have whacked away with a shovel, stood in icy water trying to break out the clog in the culvert, and gotten nowhere.  This pump idea worked out fine.  Sometimes I even surprise myself!!


No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.(John Cassavetes)

Hooah