OFF TOPIC blog

When I go to the home improvement center I tell people I am going to Handy Homer’s. Sometimes they ask me ‘what?’. Sometimes they just ignore the comment.

To call these places ‘home improvement centers’ might be a conflict in terms. Sure, they have lots of products used in the home, around the house, even building supplies, but improvement depends on how they are used not in what they are.

Over the years the area I live in has had several large home improvement type stores. All of them being places where you can buy hardware and building materials at a discount. At one time we used to have a chain of Handy Dan stores. Then came Homers. Now Home Depot and Lowes.

Handy Homer’s is a combination of Handy Dan and Homers. It is also a play on words referring to Homer Simpson of the cartoon character Homer Simpson. If you have ever watched even one episode of the ‘The Simpson’s’ you will appreciate the irony. Homer Simpson is anything but handy. Homer Simpson has far too many human traits that are self destructive. Home improvement centers have far too much material that could be dangerous when used by people with too many self destructive human traits. Hence the term Handy Homers.

Old timers, like me, appreciate the irony. Now, knowing the history, maybe the young wippersnappers can appreciate it too. Wippersnappers, you know, anyone under the age of 50.

Not long ago we had an election. In addition to the ‘public servants’ seeking election and re-election we also had a proposition to allow sale of ‘adult’ beverages in our local area.

Deciding it was about time our burg joined the 21st century, I voted in favor of the proposition. In truth I really did not care about the advantages and disadvantages of such a proposition. It just seemed that it was about time to repeal prohibition on a local scale.

Now it seems that was not enough. Apparently our burg is divided into sections and all sections are not covered by the approval of the original proposition so now those in the sections which were not covered have to collect 60k signatures to appeal to the governing body to hold an additional election. I may have some of the details wrong but I do know that there is additional effort required to approve this proposition for all of the burg we live in. A classic situation of the tail wagging the dog. (I am in favor of a petition to get rid of the idiots that set this up. This so called ‘governing body’ needs its ashed hauled, right now and before it has a chance to screw us again. )

That alone is enough to rub me the wrong way, because I know for a fact that all this complexity is caused by some undeserving clod rigging things to make it work for him regardless of how it effects the citizens. This is a common practice of politicians. Especially those who claim they are in there to make a difference. Only they don’t come completely clean in revealing that the difference they are striving for is the embellishment of their riches.

My phone rings. I am not expecting any calls so I let the machine answer. Imagine my surprise to discover that it is a call from a machine appraising me of the dry versus wet conflict resulting from the recent election. Furthermore they promise to waste more of my resources by sending around someone with paperwork for me to sign. A petition.

I just voted in favor of selling ‘adult’ beverages locally not a week ago. Why are you bothering me again with this waste of time!!?? At least that was the question in my mind.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Then I came to the realization that these miscreants had just used my private telephone and my private answering machine to ruin my afternoon. I have heard it said that it is better to pissed off than to be pissed on. I think I am suffering both.

Campaigning via private telephone using the private resources of the people you are seeking as voters on your behalf should be OUTLAWED !!! Why? Because it pisses people off! It is like spam in email. Do you really think that the offers submitted through spam are going to be acted on by people receiving this unwanted material?

I pity the fool they are going to send around to get my signature on the the petition. He might leave with a bill for unauthorized use of private property but there will be no signature on the petition from this house.

There is no way I can support the issues of people who do not respect personal rights and property. Even if I am in agreement with those issues. First impressions are all important. A bad first impression deserves an equally poor response regardless of the content.

Besides, I don’t consume enough ‘adult’ beverages to really care about the issue. I do support a 24-7 telephone system that I would prefer not be abused.

I have never given much thought to the phrase ‘fair and balance’. I just accepted the term but lately it has begun to annoy me because it has no definite meaning when used to qualify a news program. Fair to whom? What about balanced, does that mean there are as many facts as fantasies in the reports? Or does it refer to an even mix of bad and good?

The term ‘fair and balanced news’ means that someone’s definition of fair and balanced has been applied before the story is told. Or, put another way, the story had been doctored and they want you to believe that it is okay because the doctorer is fair and balanced.

Any doctoring of a news story is done to be unfair to someone or something and people engaged in that action are anything but balanced. It takes a completely unbalanced person to think that such action will be accepted by any educated audience.

I am fresh out of patience with news that is made up, doctored, or non-factual. For a news program to make claims that their stories are more than just the facts, condemns them to be considered as part of an ever increasing group of silly propagandists.

The facts mam, just the facts. If you are not sure as to what happened, I am not interested in your version of what you think might have happened, or should have happened, or would have happened if you ruled the world.

It is a good thing that I don’t mind the taste of chicken. ‘It tastes sort of like chicken’ is a phrase you hear often enough to make you realize that nearly everything tastes like chicken.

Chicken is okay and it is inexpensive. We usually load up on whole chickens when we find them on a special sale. One whole chicken is enough for a whole week of suppers for two if you are careful about preparation and portion size.

We normally start by cutting it up. Legs, thighs, breasts, and wings are removed. I am partial to wings, thighs, and legs but also have never been known to reject a chicken breast.

Chicken is also good roasted whole or smoked. Smoked chicken is excellent but you may not care for it in soup.

Once those parts are removed, you are left with a carcass that still has some meat on it but nothing in sufficient quantity to make a couple of meals. So, we boil the carcass in a big pot with lots of water and herbs. Rosemary, thyme, salt, pepper, bay leaf, sage, or whatever you consider makes stuff taste good. Let it boil for an hour or two. Then turn off the heat and let it cool.

When cool remove the carcass and pick off the cooked meat. Cut the meat into small pieces and set aside to make soup.

Use a ladle to skim off the liquid chicken broth and pour it into jars, a ladle full at a time. I use Prego jars. One carcass will make enough broth to fill three jars and still have enough fixings left over to fill three more jars with chicken rice soup. Or you can use noodles.

Once the three jars of broth have been filled, pour what is left in the pot through a strainer to remove all solids. Pour the strained liguid back into the pot, add several diced sticks of celery and a diced carrot. Add water until the pot is half full. Add back the cut up chicken meat. Bring this to a boil. Turn down the heat so that it is still at a boil but just barely. Add one cup of dry rice. Not instant rice! Just normal dry rice. Let that simmer for at least half an hour. Stir it every ten minutes or so. Let it cool and pour it into Prego jars.

You should now have three jars of chicken broth and three jars of concentrated chicken rice soup. Each jar of soup can be used to make four servings. The chicken broth is handy for use as soup stock, stew stock, rice flavoring.

The stocks are self explanatory. The rice flavoring might need some explanation.

There are lots of ways of preparing rice. Most of them involve the use of hot water. One of my favorite ways of preparation is in a large skillet. Cover the bottom of the skillet with a drizzle of olive oil. Bring to temperature with the burner at medium heat. Pour a cup of dry rice into the skillet. Stir while it is cooking. Cook until it is light brown. Be careful not to let it get too dark. Stop the browning by pouring in a Prego jar full of chicken broth. Lots of noise, lots of steam. Stir well and put a lid on it. Let it sit for five minutes and check back to stir some more. The idea here is to let the rice cook completely and absorb the chicken broth. Add diced onion, diced bell pepper, diced carrots, diced tomato, or whatever vegetable you like. Or don’t add anything at all. If you don’t let this dish burn, there is no way to ruin it.

You can make the rice as fluffy or as soupy as you want. Just don’t let it burn. Burn it will too if you cook off all the liquid and let it sit without stirring. Soupy rice is best for use in casseroles. Pour the soupy rice into a casserole dish and cover it with a few fillets of fish seasoned with salt, pepper, and dill. Or use chicken breasts with the salt, pepper, and dill. You may also want to try to add a can of condensed mushroom soup to the rice. That makes for a very rich casserole but still fairly low calorie. It just tastes rich. Tastes good too, if you like mushrooms. If you really like mushrooms, just add a can of mushrooms to the rice and forget the condensed soup.

Put that in an oven at 350 degrees. Let bake for an hour or so. Remove from the oven and melt a couple of patties of butter on top of the meat. Serve. Given the amounts of rice used this will make four generous portions.

What do passwords and pain have in common? They are both PIAs.

Why is it that the first thing I do with a password is forget to write it down? Oh, you are not supposed to write it down?

I know you are not supposed to publish it but if I don’t write it down, I spend hours trying different combinations of familiar things before I can do what I need done. Just like I did for the last hour or so. This time it was not just the password, it was the user name too. It is really hell when you forget your name. Even worse if you forget the URL of the place you need to use it.

I am reluctant to attribute this new found talent to age. It makes me feel better to blame it on over reliance on bookmarks and computer stored passwords. Computer assistance is great until you are caught off guard without the computer. Guess I am going to have to update my cribsheet and start using it again.

I am in Austin for the weekend. Watching reruns of Dora, Super Pets, and other assorted Noggin classics with the grandkids.

Austin is only about 200 miles south of Dallas. It is three to four hours depending on how many times you stop or are stopped. It seems a lot longer when you are actually on the road.

After the first hour on the road this time I remember commenting that it seems like we have been traveling for at least a week. I always underestimate how long it takes to get to Waco. Maybe because the signs to Waco are too optimistically placed. I am of the opinion that small towns should not be announced by a sign unless you are closer than 30 miles to the place. I keep seeing signs like 50 miles to Waco, then 40 miles to Waco. This time it seemed that there was an entire hour between the 50 and 40 mile signs. I was begining to wonder if Waco was also underway and traveling away from us to the south.

It must have been a big football weekend. I know that A&M played OU but I don’t remember who won. I am not much of a football fan. I have often thought that teams should have thier own balls so they won’t have to fight over the same scrap of pigskin. I believe they used to be made of pigskin. At least that is what they were called. Nowdays, footballs are probably made of rubber somewhere in China.

During this trip there were more than a few orange colored, temporary flags flying from car windows. Lots of orange longhorn decals all affixed to vehicles doing at least ten miles over the speed limit. Wonder why they don’t get stopped. I guess it is considered more dangerous to have a burned out brake light than to be travelling under a 95mph head of steam.

Some time ago that was me as well. Travelling at speed in the fast lane. Not exactly bumper to bumper but there was not much room between vehicles. A chain reaction pileup looking for a place to happen. You didn’t dare allow more room between vehicles. Riding bumper was the only way to let the car in front know that you wanted to pass. They, in turn sped up as that was the only way they had of letting you know they did not want you to pass.

And so it went, sometimes all the way to the ultimate destination. Safety in numbers. There was no way the highway patrol could pull over ALL of that convoy at the same time.

Nowdays I let them pass me. I am content to plod along in the right lane with the cruise control set to 65mph. Sometimes I will wave as they pass. Sometimes I will hold up all four fingers when I wave.

I have to admit that I used to be a speed freak because I enjoyed the thrill. I was never in the hurry that my speed would have indicated. No fire to go to, just having fun pretending to be a Nascar driver.

Then I discovered that my old Camry could deliver 32 miles per gallon if I drove no faster than 65mph. Back when gasoline was under 1.50 a gallon the good mpg was not that much a factor. Now, when it costs twice as much fill a tank I have discovered my miser threshold. Speeding in a convoy was costing me as much as five bucks a trip extra. More if I ended up getting stopped. So I don’t do that anymore. I leave that to the truckers.

It took me a long time to understand why truckers speed. Turns out they get paid by the mile. The more miles, the more money. The more miles per hour, the more dollars per hour. When you can make 50 bucks an hour doing 90mph compared to 30 bucks an hour doing 65mph which would you choose. The difference in speed is not going to save you the 20 bucks difference if you go slower. More importantly, it is going to cost you much less than 20 bucks more for fuel at the higher speed.

There are plenty more words in this processor but I am begining to have trouble arranging them so they make sense. Some might call this writers block. Others might not be so kind. I call it ‘thats it, I am done.’

We always vote early. We partake on the last day of early voting. I guess that is more early late than early early. In any case it avoids the traffic and long lines that can form for those who vote at the last minute.

As usual we were met outside the entrance of the court house by someone we had never heard of stumping for our votes. I don’t understand why people do that. Don’t they know that is as bad as spam in email? Don’t they understand it makes them look as desperate as they act? I don’t need to find out how they claim to stand on the issues. Anyone that desperate to be elected has got to be up to no good.

When I am less than 200 feet from the voting booth, I don’t need some unknown nobody getting in my face, eager to win my vote. My mind is usually made up long before that and its going to take more than a ‘please read this and vote for me’ to change my mind.

I give more than just a passing look at a candidates qualifications. I am not talking about his qualifications to do the job. I am talking about his qualifications to do the job I want done. That has more to do with the job he has already taken credit for than any recent promises he has made.

It is no fun at all to have to later admit that you ended up voting for the guy who had the biggest horns and longest tail. Even if you only have to admit that to yourself.

In fact, if the guy in my face is someone I was going to vote for anyway, I may even split the ticket if I have to, just to be able to vote against him.

Someone who is unhinged to the point of desperate campaigning in front of a voting place is automatically disqualified from serving in public office as far as I am concerned. A vote for such a misfit would risk infecting the voter with the candidates lack of discretion and class.

Look at it this way, if a guy is a real pig for votes and attention before election, he probably will not get better after he is elected and I don’t want to have to find out how bad he could get.

So I was not entirely cordial to what I considered an unnecessary and unwanted interruption in my walk to the voting booth. That did not bother the miscreant at all. He just ignored me and focused his attention on the next person. Marks of a true politician.

Chuckling under my breath I continued to the voting booths. I was there to throw some of the old bums out, not to let new bums in.

Here we go again. One of these days I will end up with a simple all band antenna system that works well enough, is easy to use, is effective, efficient, mechanically sound, and all those things we like to see in an antenna system. A setup soooooo goooood that I won’t be tempted to mess with it.

Yeah, I am not there yet. Lucky guess.

I do have a system up now that is unique, and works, but it does not work well enough to give up on trying something new.

Actually, all-band is guilding the lily somewhat. All I need it to cover is 80,75,40,and 30 meters. I could do it with traps but I want to cover ALL of the frequencies in those bands and I want to do it with SWRs of less than 1.5:1. Okay, I know SWR is not everything. Some antennas with high SWR are very good performers. True, but my radios don’t like high SWR so I need some way of tuning things so that SWR does not become a factor.

My Main rig includes an automatic antenna tuner, so the job should be easy. It would be if I was satisfied to endure the loss in coaxial cable that I would get with SWRs higher than 3:1 on the line from the tuner to the antenna. I don’t want to do that. I figure if am going to go to the trouble of matching feedline to radio so I get a maximum power output, the least I can do is show enough respect for that power by not wasting it as heat in the feedline.

Also, I don’t like baluns. I don’t like building them, using them, or worrying about possible losses in them. At the same time I would also like to keep my radiation pattern as balanced as possible.

When you put all those ‘wants’ together, they point to the use of open wire line, a balanced tuner, and a non resonant dipole.

I have come full circle. That is what I had five years ago, before I began experimenting with antennas. Back then I wanted to get rid of the antenna tuner. I guess I still could by using transmission line matching transformers but just my luck I would find a frequency that I would want to try and the transformers did not want to match. No, got to be adjustable from inside the shack AND cover all frequencies in all bands from 80 to 30 meters. Hmmm….wonder if I should include the 60 meter section as well? Why not!

Predictable radiation patterns are a good thing. An 88 foot dipole will provide predictable patterns for all the bands being considered. It will not be super efficient on 80 or 75 but I am not going to be interested in low band DXing anyway. The 88 footer should be fine for locals out to 300 miles or so. That 88 footer is 44 feet per side. That will work out fairly well. My center support is at 50 feet. My end supports are high enough so that the 44 foot horizontal distance will still be elevated at 35 feet. Not exactly flat-topped, but better than a full sized inverted vee on 80.

I will use what is left of all that surplus RG62 coax. 88 feet for the antenna and two lengths of 100 feet to make some ‘open wire line’. Use the sheet PVC to make insulators. Always wanted to try that. The old 450 ohm ladder line is pretty old and beat up and I don’t want to buy any more of that stuff. I just don’t want to spend the money when I already have the materials for an alternate solution.

So here is hoping that this is going to work out well.