E:\LETTERS\APRBAN11.TXT 1 April 2011 There's more greenery on Al's new wheat sprouts than on his old ones, but I'm going to wait until tomorrow to put them down where he can reach them. Gave the edges of the flowered jersey another coat of starch, and looked at the package of white jersey -- five yards. 2 April 2011 I've been noticing for some time that the willow tree looks cloudy in the webcam. This morning the sun was on it and I saw cloudiness with the naked eye. Studied it for a while, and it isn't budding out -- the fine twigs have turned yellow. Class starts next Saturday and I'm only on page 26 of my homework. Was thinking about basting the edges of my white cotton jersey before washing it, thought hey, it's perfectly plain, maybe I can straighten the ends by drawing a thread; then it will be easy to keep the grain straight. The jersey will unravel, but it just won't draw, unless you count picking stitches out half a stitch -- at most -- at a time. I'm beginning to think I dreamed that incident in which I cut a knit fabric by drawing a thread out of it. The thread must have been very slick and strong. I've got to page 34. 218 pages in the book, but there are some indexes and stuff in the back. 4 April 2011 On the other hand, the selvages of the white jersey are knitted in a different stitch which might not curl as much; I think I'll risk washing it without basting the edges together. I wrote enthusiastically about how much better disposable rags are than paper towels -- then I used up the off-white shirt and cut up a black one. But when I used the next-to-the-last black rag to dry the lid to my iron skillets, enthusiasm returned -- I just wiped right over the "self basting" bumps with no fear of leaving paper crumbs on the lid. Today washday. I should read my book between loads, but I've already got a game going on the living-room computer. My bookmark is at page 36. 5 April 2011 So yesterday I cut another black rag into paper-towel size pieces. I've gotten used to black -- and I want to get rid of the least-useful rags first. (But I picked "least useful" on shape; it just happened to be black.) Bookmark now at page 54 of the General book -- but I still haven't got a clue with respect to sub-element E0 on the Extra Test, and exceeding few clues to sub-element E2. I did find out what APRS was from the General book shortly after missing a question about it on the Extra test. But I don't even know what I meant by writing "series resonant" and "power factor" in my notes. Began this morning by washing my skinned knee with peroxide and putting a little triple antibiotic on it. Hope it isn't too little too late -- I forgot it entirely yesterday, perhaps because I went barefoot all day, and therefore never kneeled to fish shoes out from under the bed. (I did peroxide and ointment it after church, and rubbed it with a wet paper towel in the ladies' room before church.) Put sandals on after I scrubbed my feet this morning, because I plan to go to Big R and Aldi after breakfast. The red spot (now with unhealthy-looking brown spots in it) is smaller than a dime, so I don't think I can get into *too* much trouble. I was pulling on my gloves as I walked out the driveway Sunday morning, and don't know exactly how I miss-stepped. Was halfway down when I first noticed, and barely had time to roll instead of splatting. Both gloves got filthy. I didn't drop the one I hadn't put on yet, which seems odd. Scuffed up the skin on the palm of the bare hand, but that washed off. -------------------- I wasn't at all happy with the last bag of onions I bought -- they started rotting almost instantly, and some of them had no detectable flavor. Today I saw onions in Aldi's produce department, remembered that I had only one heel of onion left, and grabbed a bag. While I was scanning the receipt for non-grocery items while entering it into Quicken, I noticed "Vidalia Onions 1.99". Oops. Luckily, the remaining onion wasn't one of those totally lacking in flavor. For my lunch, I made hash out of that, a left-over chunk of baked potato, a piece of left-over steak, a dab of canned minced garlic, a stalk and some tops of celery, and smoked sea salt. I found Uncle Paul's Critter Food Corncob bedding at Big R today -- in one-filling packets at four dollars each. So I went back to the big-animal supplies and bought thirty pounds of Beck's Better Bedding for the same price. I was rather surprised that I didn't have the least difficulty in getting the bag out of the cart and into the trunk. It's about time to put the used litter on flower beds and put the container back into rain-barrel service. Also bought a bag of weight-control cat food. With warm weather coming on, it's time to figure out how to keep it in the freezer. There's plenty of room, but not all in the same place. I've got to bear in mind that I plan to top off my flour supply. Keeping pasta and flour in the same division might not work out after all. (There's certainly no space for pasta in the bread bin; the bread frequently overflows into the vegetables.) ------------------------- Took my homework to Handwork Circle and got to page 70. I still have no clue about resonant series or power factor. I got two nice surprises at Aldi: they had canned broth in cans! I got two of beef (because I have an un-opened box of beef) and three of chicken, just in case it's a temporary thing. *And* they had instant brown rice. I'd looked and looked for it, then decided that I must have gotten it at Sherman and Lin's. It was on an attention-getting display, so I bought three boxes. 6 April 2011 Spent all of my non-frittered time this morning taking aa9pw's practice Extra exam -- but I passed! I just barely passed, and there were two lucky guesses and quite a lot of looking up, but I'll retain at least some of what I looked up. Just wish I'd stop clicking on "percentage of modulation" when I know, by now, that it's "modulation index". Bookmark at p. 74. I've hardly cracked the Extra book. 9 April 2011 A quart of tea and two bars of dark chocolate were not enough. Thought I'd fall asleep in my seat along about three in the afternoon. Planning to make the tea twice as strong tomorrow. And, perhaps, drink it later. Thought I might go to Aldi to buy macaroni to make soup for supper; scratched that thought about three -- turn left across thirty *twice* in my condition? Was perked up some when class let out, but it was also exactly time for me to start cooking, so I went straight home. Timed the drive at four minutes. Dave was about to get a hamburger out of the freezer, so we got out two and the last two buns. The onion was mild, but not flavorless. 11 April 2011 Woke up at eight instead of nine -- but not all the way. With enough strong tea and dark chocolate, I can skip my nap two days in a row, but you mustn't expect too much of me on the third day. Yesterday Dave zapped a "shrimp alfredo" entree, and I found some penne regati to boil in left-over soup and the rest of the box of beef broth. I kept forgetting the scrape on my knee and now it's infected. How do you go about soaking a knee in bleach? Cain't stick a band-aid on it either, but perhaps wound cream would stick if I change into shorts. -------------------------------------------------- The smallest size of band-aid did stick, which is fortunate because it has to get very hot indeed before I'm comfortable in shorts -- and it's really hard to keep things from rubbing antiseptic gunk off your knees. Spent the morning taking another practice test and reading webbed comic strips. I learned a couple of things from the test, but can't remember them now. Napped until two, then went back to bed until three. I feel reasonably functional now. I just made a batch of tartar sauce and plan to bake tilapia for supper. I just clunk the unadorned frozen filets onto the cast-iron griddle and pop them into a 400F oven for fifteen or twenty minutes. Today's mail included one of those envelopes that might as well have "This is a scam" stamped on it in nineteen- point red letters. Nothing in it but a very convincing check for a thousand dollars and a slip of paper with verbiage that might as well be "lorem ipsum dolor" except for a URL that I'm most definitely not going to feed into Firefox. Dave Googled, and learned nothing except that a lot of people have gotten them. -------------------------------------------------- Arrgh! Just found a cottonwood bud cover stuck to my toe. I zapped cauliflower to have with the fish; saw the white plate covered with white food and thought "what was I *thinking*!" but it tasted pretty good -- particularly when I put a dribble of "three-cheese salad dressing" (sweet vinegarette with no cheese flavor) on the cauliflower. I hope Aldi has three-cheese dressing again sometime; it's pretty good. The daffodils are in bloom, as are the narcissus in the lily bed. And the lilies are coming up -- that's a relief; when I thinned them last summer, I removed every bulb I could find, confident that I would miss enough that I didn't need to leave any on purpose. But for a while this spring, I wasn't sure, particularly after they started coming up among the iris, where I hadn't dug. 12 April 2011 About eleven o'clock last night I was planning out what to do today, and thought "and I have a very important Fellowship Committee meeting at six p.m. -- TODAY!!!" Oops. I was fairly industrious today: a load and a half of wash, ironed two shirts, did some pressing on the bra in progress, and took the jersey for my new T-shirts to church to starch it on four big tables. (It hung off one end.) While the jersey was drying I cleaned the fridges, re- filled the ice trays (which didn't really need doing; I had to shake the bin to make all the ice fit) and got through "Transmitters" and "Receivers" in my textbook. I mean to take another practice test after I finish reading my funnies. 13 April 2011 More progress on bra, woke up from nap early enough to run out for milk and lettuce; forgot to buy eggs for pickling. Now I've kept an appointment by mistake: I thought there was no banner-committee meeting, but I wanted my Wednesday walk, so I went anyway -- and met Martha in the ramp room. It's going to be on brown paper this month. Good meeting; Martha had the banner well advanced. But this one is only half done, and there needs to be another. Read only a little in my homework. The willow is leafed out, and the hyacinths are in bloom. If you get down on your knees and use a magnifying glass, there are teeny four-petaled daisy-looking things in the gravel beside the front patio. Lily of the valley are showing, and tiger lilies are up. Narcissus and daffodils and crocus everywhere. And little blue flowers in the lawn. 14 April 2011 I put my leaving-the-house pants on by mistake this morning, and decided that as long as I was dressed, I might as well run out for the eggs I forgot yesterday. Then I looked out the window and changed into my cycling suit. Found three or four magazines on the bike, so I went to the emergency room first; since I'd gone out by Harrison I cut through the parking lots to Parker. On the way I noticed the Pillbox Pharmacy, which I'd never set foot in, so I took a tour. I chose the wrong street to get back to McKinley on, so I didn't stop at the book store, but still managed to use up the whole morning. Found another steak very like the ribeye we had yesterday, bought another potato and re-ran yesterday's menu, including blue cheese salad dressing on the potato. A man from Smith put a new controller in our fridge this afternoon. I wasn't *quite* done with my nap when Smith telephoned say he was coming. Some people from the parks department took out two of the horseshoe pits and built new ones, and started demolishing the other two. I'm passing the Extra exam every day now, but I don't think they'll let me use Wikipedia for the real one. So far, I'm up-to-date in taking notes for our next Christmas letter. Perhaps I'll send it out at Christmas time! 15 April 2011 There went the morning. Checked my mail, wanted to read the Deal of the Day from fabric.com, decided that as long as I had the browser open I'd take a practice exam. Fifty questions, some of which can require five minutes or more of study. There are still whole categories of questions that cause me to emulate Red Skelton's Clem Kadiddlehopper act, but I'm getting a high-enough percentage on the others that I think I can afford to blow off those. (And one does average 25% on random guesses. Perhaps I should use a coin, rather than just saying "duh" and clicking "A".) One thing I must not do on the real one: observe that the answer is symbol #1 in the figure, then click the first answer on the multiple choice! I may well get an Extra license without learning all the material for the General. In addition to reading the General book and an old Extra book (physics chapters only), this morning I began reading the Kenwood TH-22AT book. I've found the on-off switch. I didn't notice anybody working, but there are now four new horse-shoe pits. Or, at least four new backboards, which is all I can see without leaving the house. [Walked out there; finished, filled with sand, and ready to go. I hope they took the sand off the sand bar, but doubt that they did.] 16 April 2011 Missed fourteen, you're only allowed thirteen. I told Lyle that I'd retake at once, and was fiddling around for my fee (the grant covers only the first exam session) when I realized that it was noon and I hadn't eaten, so I begged off. Was thinking that it was chicken of me -- I did have a dark-chocolate bar to keep my blood sugar up, and there was more juice -- but shortly after coming home, about the time that I'd have been halfway through the test, I had an urgent need to leave the room. Since you can't leave the testing room without handing your answer sheet in for scoring, that would have been another flunk anyhow. The other fellow who took the Extra didn't miss *any* questions! And he finished sooner. But I did get a late start on account of getting the wrong booklet. About four questions down, I realized that I'd forgotten to put the version number on, noticed that it was Element Three, consternated a while, then realized that the wrong test had thirty-five questions and the right one had fifty, checked, traded it in. The version of Element Four I had opened with a couple of questions on a topic that I'd never even heard of. I think I'll study for a few weeks before scheduling another exam. You can, if you make an appointment, turn up early for any meeting of the Hoosier Lakes Hams. Tomorrow being Palm Sunday, I want to wear my villa- olive dress. But it requires a solid-color scarf, my orange silk is too loud, the black silk is too big, and the black cotton is too small. Maybe if I pin the cotton one in place . . . It's been cold and rainy all day. Hope it stops precipitating tomorrow. 17 April 2011 I wore my long coat to church this morning -- it's a lot colder than it was when the temperature was lower. (I forgot entirely that the dress called for a scarf.) Everything is blooming enthusiastically, and all the trees are leafing out, including a big one that has fallen over on this side of the Auditorium. The forked trunk lay on both sides of a young tree, and I thought "that tree lucked out!", then looked up to see that all its branches had been broken off and it ended in a splintered trunk. Boiled eggs and dumped two cans of pickled beets and some rice vinegar on them. Also boiled some honey, raisins, and an egg preparatory to making fruitcake for the Easter Breakfast. I'm planning to dump in an entire package of english walnuts. Random thought: it was a mistake to have "milli" and "mega" in the same system; "Mm" is easily mistaken for "mm". So how long would a 1 mHz wave be? (Shifts decimal points: 300,000 Mm.) Whereas a 1MHz wave would be 300 m. 18 April 2011 Grumble, gripe -- I ran a load of white clothes today, and forgot entirely that both pairs of white jeans were filthy. So what do I wear tomorrow night? We didn't *quite* eat all of the cake that I cut into. There are five in the freezer, which should be ample. 19 April 2011 Tolerable storm going on now, but it seems to be tapering off. The motion detector on Dave's camera was having fun for a while; he expects to collect a good lightning-strike movie in the morning. Washed a load of blacks, threw in what I was wearing, put on an identical outfit. I thought about putting a load of hot whites in to soak, but tomorrow isn't supposed to be a good drying day and we aren't desperate for pillowcases or dish towels. I took my homework to Handwork Circle, and now I'm on page 132. 23 April 2011 Washed hot whites on Thursday. Rode my bike to Owen's to buy eggs yesterday. Today I helped set up the room for tomorrow's breakfast in the morning, stopped to visit with Martha on the way home, slept all afternoon -- phone rang when I was half an hour into my nap and I had to start over -- woke up after time to start cooking supper, made spaghetti and meatballs (diluted the left-over spaghetti sauce with tomato cocktail because there wasn't quite enough). In the evening I devilled a dozen and a half eggs and made potato salad. Urgh. I wanted to make potato salad to use up a surplus bottle of capers -- and I forgot to put them in. I did put in some chopped sweet pickle, so I guess I sort of thought of the capers! Ah, well, there's no reason I can't make a salad just for us sometime. Potato salad doesn't last long because I like a potato salad sprinkled with diced cheese or bacon bits for lunch. The cream cheese I meant to put into the devilled eggs had a speck of mold on it, so I skimmed the thick top off a container of sour cream to use instead. I had bought sour cream for the potato salad, but decided that mayonesa with garlic vinegar would be better. Also added a few slices of onion to the pickled beets. 25 April 2011 Mmm . . . 100%-silk sheers, 43" wide, $3.95/yd in fabric.com's home-dec clearance section, woven with slightly heavier slightly contrasting threads at one-inch intervals in both directions, which would give it some of the properties of Ripstop. It's good that none of the colors are pretty -- I have no use whatsoever for sheer silk fabric. I logged into fabric.com because the Deal of the Day was red and purple fabrics for $1.58 up, but the $1.58 fabrics were tulle. (I'd hoped that they'd found a few reds or purples in the $1.98 section, which often has real bargains. Lots of cotton shirtings today, for example.) I was awake until 3:00 a.m. because I was too tired to go to bed, but I woke up fifteen minutes early and feel reasonably functional. Slept solid when I finally got down. I'm washing one load of white-and-light today. Including one pair of my white jeans! (May take me an hour to rub all the stains with Ivory.) Rain is supposed to last until Thursday. I'm putting off blacks until tomorrow so I can wash some of what I've got on -- and it's hardly a quarter load. I forgot to take Alice's books -- and forgot to pick up mine. Also forgot that I'd meant to take her a sack of white-wheat flour to make it easier to use up my supply before May. And I rather suspect that she found my egg container after we left -- I can't find it, and remember picking it up to put it into the car, then putting it down so that I could snitch a quart of Sara Lee's pasta-free pasta salad. (Which is down a couple of inches already; it was very good on cold left-over meatballs.) And I forgot to go upstairs on my way out of the church to see what surprises the pastor had for us. It will all be cleaned up by Tuesday. I did remember to snitch a couple of Martha's carrot-and-fruit muffins -- Dave and I ate one of them by bedtime. Half past three ----------------------- And we're now more than halfway through the other muffin. A note on page 133 in the General-Class book explains resonant circuits. Now all I need to do is to run what they are calling "dimensional analysis" these days -- Dr. Kolitchew called it "treat units as though they were algebraic constants" -- to assure myself that two pi per second times henry and the inverse of two pi per second farads both come out in ohms, then I'll be able to remember those two formulas -- just one, really, since capacitance is inductance backward -- and I'll have most of the questions that I missed on the Extra test. And this means that it will be useful to resume taking practice tests sooner than I expected. I had got to the place where I either knew the answer or didn't have the foggiest idea how to look it up, so wasn't learning anything. Might could be I'll be asking for a test instead of a book recommendation when I go to a ham-club meeting. Particularly considering that the first one I can attend is in June. (I have a previous appointment in May.) 26 April 2011 Today was pretty much taken up by a trip to Aunt Millies by way of Aldi. I meant to buy some potato sets at Big R, but didn't see any. All I wanted at Aldi was chocolate -- we were out -- but I spent $48.95 Also stopped at two shoe stores. I saw a "well, it'll do" pair of sandals and a pair that wouldn't require me to keep repeating "nobody looks at feet", but I liked each less than half as much as the fellow who put the price tags on did, so I didn't try either on. Both were lined with puffy fabric, which I don't like at all. I thought I could use the undistracted time in Handwork Circle to come to terms with the impedance vs. frequency formulas, but when I sat down to do it, I realized that I didn't have the slightest idea what the definitions of "henry" and "farad" were. So I worked my way to page 160 instead. 27 April 2011 Found out why my bag was so heavy when I unzipped the wrong pocket while packing up to come home from banner making -- three books and my worksheets are still in it from yesterday. The banners would be all finished and hung if one of us had remembered to bring double-sided tape to secure the rod pockets. (The banners are paper this time. Entirely done with pens and pencils and maybe some crayons.) Pastor Henry says that the next theme will be "take a hike" because that is what he'll be doing. Though it was plain that "take a hike" was purely metaphorical, I wonder whether he means to go hiking after he's retired. Dave's all done refurbishing the picnic table, but is considering one more coat of yellow paint. He'll decide after we get some sunlight. He bought the hardest polyurethane varnish he could find to discourage Al from clawing the woodwork, and that made him notice that the "the Beesons/1700 Park Avenue" sign was weathered, so he took it down and sanded it. I sewed the bottom hem of my new bra and attached the binding to the armholes. Need to fold the binding to the inside and stitch it, and run two more rows of stitching around the hem and put three pieces of 1/4" elastic in it. Got the stitching lines marked before naptime. Woke up in time to go buy soda before supper, and found a very good ribeye steak reduced for quick sale, I served it with zapped sweet potato, sour cream, smoked salt, and "asian stir fry" vegetables. I haven't washed blacks yet. There's still a bagel and a half left from my previous trip to Aunt Millies. I had half a bagel fried in herb- flavored duck fat for my after-nine treat -- and now I want to go back and fry the other. This good news/bad news pops up fairly often: I checked my hairdo in the mirror when I arrived at the church and realized that I looked like a movie star. The bad news is that she was playing Ma Kettle. 28 April 2011 When I was carrying my cereal bowl back to the kitchen, I heard that unmistakable THUNK from the living room. Rinsed the bowl, then went into the living room to see two birds motionless on the patio. One was a male red-winged blackbird, the other was a bit smaller than the two female blackbirds who were looking on with concern, and she lacks the almost-epaulet that the other two had. Is it late enough in the spring that it could be a juvenile? Neither had moved by the time I finished looking up "blackbirds" in the bird book -- I'd never seen a redwing close enough to notice the yellow band on the epaulet -- so I presume they are dead. Al is still keeping an eye on them. The two females went back to gathering nesting material, and are now out of sight. I wonder why there was only one thunk? I've come around to thinking that the smaller bird is a sparrow that died earlier, when I was too far off to hear the smaller thunk. It's marked a lot like the female blackbirds, but most hens have camouflage feathers. For some time I've been thinking "this burn is more than a week old -- why is the blister on my wrist still tense and puffy?" I was always bumping it on something and was sure I'd break it. Last night while sitting at the keyboard I noticed that the blister was empty and thought that I finally had broken it, but when I went to look for antiseptic ointment and a band-aid, in the better light I could see that it had gone flat on its own. I rather expected the process to be more gradual. The scrape on my knee is now only a patch of rough skin. I've been thinking it odd that there are plenty of cottonwood bud covers on the ground, but I haven't been getting gunk on my feet. Duh! It's been so cold and wet that I haven't gone out. Looks sunny out this morning, though. Hope I remember to work in the garden a little -- way past time to plant the multipliers. Make that a triple-take on the tree the other tree fell over on. I said that at first glance I thought it had been spared, at second glance I saw that the whole top had been broken off. The day before yesterday I walked home the way that takes me past the crash site, which is nearly cleaned up -- the trunks are cut up and all the small stuff has been carried away. The stump of the smaller tree is quite hollow -- little more than the bark was supporting the tree, so it would have been doomed anyway. I didn't think to look at the ends of the trunk sections of the big tree. Just figured out why the pickled eggs started to fade after a while. There isn't any more dye for the outsides to pull out of the pickle, but the insides are still pulling dye out of the outsides. Ah, well, I always cut an egg in half before eating it, and the insides are real purty. Evening: I considered nagging Dave into going for a walk, then realized that I'd have to put clothes on. It's too cold and windy to work in the garden, but I've finally finished my new bra. I plan to cut out four more as soon as I've wear-tested the modified pattern. 30 April 2011 As I had hoped, the little corpses were gone in the morning. The scavenger didn't even leave feathers scattered around. Dave wondered why his motion-detecting infrared camera hadn't caught it, then decided that it must have taken the birds before the recording began at ten. I hoed in the garden only a few minutes Friday, but I was sore this morning. Not very sore, and it quickly worked out. Also had some cottonwood gunk on my feet, which surprised me because I thought I'd put shoes on every time I went out. Two of my rhubarb plants made it through the winter, and one looks as though it may spare a stalk or two later in the spring. We had asparagus in an omelet this morning -- nothing showing in the asparagus bed yet, but the volunteer plant in the corner of the garden didn't get tilled up on account of being in the corner, and it had one fairly decent sprout and two thin ones. Then I went off to Work Day at the church and helped Pastor Bonnie put eight dozen party favors together for Mother's Day. I unflattened eight dozen "gift boxes" and put five Hershey kisses in each one, about then Pastor Bonnie came back and we tied tags to them with ribbon together. After a while we gave up tying bows; square knots and surgeon's knots were much easier, looked at least as nice, and took less ribbon. She thought that we might run out of kisses, but there were a handful left. I briefly thought about opening boxes and adding one to each until they were gone, then swept them up and put them beside the coffee maker in the print room. Grilled a muenster-and-smoked-turkey sandwich, picked up a few sticks, and took a nap. Baked one flounder filet and one tilapia filet for supper. Following the instructions for the flounder, I baked them fifteen minutes at 350F instead of ten minutes at 400F, and they shrank amazingly. Back to 400F next time, no matter what it says on the box. I hoed the garden again while the filets were in the oven. Made my third after-supper bike trip to Owen's of the spring; this time I got the stuff in the cart loose. Whether it's because I was more detailed and emphatic, or because the bag boy was one of the more-experienced ones, I'm not sure. I'm still on page 160, but that's only about twenty pages of homework -- the rest is reference material, indexes, and the like. Time to go hunting for a code- learning program that doesn't practice my bad habits. The red tulips that I exterminated twice are in glorious bloom -- that's the bonfire you see on the IP cam. I'd say y'all could have some very pretty, very tough tulips after they go dormant, but if I recall correctly, they are *very* deep -- and I plan to plant a tomato where it would be disturbed if I tried to dig them up. We still have a little of Sara Lee's salad. Dave likes it on his chopped lettuce, and wants me to ask her for the recipe.