{"id":42,"date":"2012-02-19T02:45:51","date_gmt":"2012-02-19T02:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/middle-age\/"},"modified":"2012-02-19T02:45:51","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T02:45:51","slug":"middle-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/middle-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Middle Age?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yet again we&#8217;re all pathetically grateful for an extra day tacked on to the weekend. Not everyone of course, there are a bunch of brothers and sisters who aren&#8217;t given this particular holiday &#8211; in the same way that my fellow workmates and I weren&#8217;t given the last couple of holidays. The entire notion of national holidays being optional is still weird to me.<\/p>\n<p>Today M and I geeked out to the extreme: we went down to the canal to spot birds for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.birdsource.org\/gbbc\/\" title=\"Great Backyard Bird Count\">GBBC<\/a> and while she was checking-off Herons, Cormorants, Cardinals and Mockingbirds I managed my first <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Amateur_radio_contact\" title=\"chat\">QSO<\/a> with a stranger. This was using my cheap-arse &#8220;Baofeng&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eham.net\/reviews\/detail\/9749\" title=\"cheap HT\">HT<\/a>, via our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phil-mont.org\/\" title=\"W3QV\">local repeater<\/a>. We chatted for around half an hour covering the usual HAM topics of traffic and HAM-hardware, but it got me really pumped to try and mess around with HF radio. He also gave me some advice about kit. Thanks Jim!<\/p>\n<p>I make no apologies for being a nerd here \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Reasons to be cheerful<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Work is mellowing out<\/li>\n<li>My dad is out of the hospital<\/li>\n<li>Lots of time to play with the TI launchpad<\/li>\n<li>Good birds in the house (our guys have been really nice companions over the past few days)<\/li>\n<li>Morse practice is coming along<\/li>\n<li>Still pumped about the impending Movie release<\/li>\n<li>Days off<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yet again we&#8217;re all pathetically grateful for an extra day tacked on to the weekend. Not everyone of course, there are a bunch of brothers and sisters who aren&#8217;t given this particular holiday &#8211; in the same way that my fellow workmates and I weren&#8217;t given the last couple of holidays. The entire notion of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}