Slug Fest 2006

One question you should never ask on a Monday: "What else can go wrong today?" — you will surely find out.

Syracuse's digital transmitter has been flaky since the middle of last week, and down completely since Saturday. Thankfully, a replacement exciter arrived this morning and the transmitter guys are installing it. In the meantime I have been getting phone calls from people who wonder if we realize it's off the air.

The computer networking between Syracuse and Watertown is down, with the result that I get an email every ten minutes telling me so. Fine, I know already.

One of our engineers was loading a piece of equipment into a pickup truck and managed to break a spot-welded hinge on the equipment. We have someone coming in with a welding set later this afternoon. As if that wasn't bad enough, the equipment also went through the back window of the cab. They're cleaning up the broken glass now.

I'm cranking out construction drawings for the build-two-CW-stations-in-a-month project... or I was until my plotter, a large Hewlett Packard, suddenly stopped with a nasty noise and an error code that isn't listed in the manual. The main drive belt that moves the printer head back and forth is shredded; a bit of research on line tells me that I really don't want to try fixing this myself, not that I have the time. A local HP repair center should be sending someone out today or tomorrow to have a look.

Had a phone conversation with my Dad yesterday... it was an early day and I wasn't terribly alert, but after comparing notes about his station's CW migration from UPN and the project I'm doing, it made me think that perhaps we were making some incorrect assumptions about the Rochester station.

We were. It turns out that Watertown is a CW-Plus system, and Rochester is CW... not the same thing at all. We have the new satellite dish installed and aimed for CW-Plus, so we thought we were all set... but the feed for ordinary CW is on a completely different satellite. Blast. So this morning I ordered another satellite dish, just like the last one. At least now I know all of the secrets and won't be surprised by the mislabeled hardware bags and the petal sections that don't want to fit.

The state department of transporation picked today to deal with the stream that separates our property from interstate 690. When we built the place 22 years ago, this was little more than a four-foot ditch several inches deep; now it spans about fifteen feet and is several feet deep. Much of this is the result of cat-tails and other vegetation that has accumulated over the years. It also doesn't help that the neighborhood has become heavily developed; what was once an open field is now a Home Depot with a huge parking lot. Rain no longer has anything to soak into, and the runoff winds up flowing past our building. A heavy storm will bring the stream up and over our parking lot.

This DOT crew is running a Gradall and a bulldozer back and forth, right behind the gazebo that the Bridge Street show uses for their live outdoor cooking segment. Not only is this making a real racket, every time the bulldozer goes past it sends a wake of muddy water up the lawn. So the production crew pulled everything back inside and set up to do the segment indoors.

It didn't matter... a special report for President Bush's 10am press conference killed the whole show. So the crew set up twice for nothing, and the guests (including a lady from Wanderer's Rest with the sort of mangy dog you would find in a Booth New Yorker cartoon) left untelevised and mildly grumpy.

Lunch is over, so my little reality avoidance mechanism needs to end. I'll leave you with a sight that greeted Laurie and me when we got home from a meeting last night and pulled up in front of the barn:



I had no idea that slugs had patterns... but in my book, they're still ugly. I also have no idea exactly what they were doing on our barn door. A note to the potentially helpful: that's not a request for information. There are some things we are better off not knowing.