Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

For those who might follow this page, I have now retired. I am no longer under contract to IPAWS as of November 29, 2022. I have not updated my pages here, but may do so later. I may also choose to work on something new at some point, but right now I am enjoying my freedom. This will be the first time since I was 14 years old that I did not have a paying gig of some kind. Pretty good run as I am 71 years old.

For those who followed in the past, I have not been active on the blog or Twitter lately. I still work IPAWS. But May 30 was the last day of active “in office” work. I can do what I need to do remotely from my motor home. My primary location is Box Elder, South Dakota. I was there for July this year and will be again next year (reservations already made). We love the Black Hills. The rest of the year, who knows?

Found that trying to get to my Blogger sites via Cox Cable connection was not working.  Cox tech support was absolutely no help.  Was planning on gettin a Verizon MIFI as backup anyway.  Got one.  Worked out of the box.  The blogs now work. Two bars of LTE connectivity seem to provide more reliability than a full-up Cox cable connection!  That just not right.  But at least my alert bloggers work again.

The domain host for my alert blogger sites apparently stopped responding to posts on 8 September 2018. I am trying to resolve issues with the hosting provider. Sorry that the alerts are not being posted during this time of increased weather activity.

My apologies to anyone looking to one of the alertblogger.com site for alerts. A power outage caused by Winter Storm Riley is preventing alerts from being posted. Hopefully we will be back to normal soon.

Something I wrote as advice about two years ago. Thinking about it now; maybe worth sharing to a wider audience:

You can regret, and still build from where you are. Regret is not the end. It puts you in a place. But that place says “the past is what it is.” It cannot be changed. All we can control is the future. The best regret can do is help us make better decisions in the future. And those decisions have to start from where you are, not where you wish you had been.

Alma NB Harbor at low tide. Boats on the bottom of the sea floor in the harbor. When the tide comes in, they can go back to work.  The next two pictures are from several taken at Hopewell Cape Park where visitors can walk on the sea floor at low tide to check out 20o million year old rocks and the formations created by Bay of Fundy tidal action. 

The pictures are from “Reversing Rapids” on the St. John river.  The water actually flows in the opposite direction with almost as much turbulence when the tide is coming in.  St John is the capital of New Brunswick.  We learned some history, primarily of the “loyalists” who left the colonies to the south when they became the USA.  Many of them came not to New Brunswick. 

Yep. This is a picture of a KOA campground half way between New York City and Albany. This campground has the feel of being in the middle of nowhere.  There are LOTS and LOTS of trees.  The nearest restaurant is 7 miles away. The roads are small and narrow. The closest industry is a state penal facility. Still, the campground is crowded and cramped (which perhaps preps the campers here for the advertised bus trips from here into New York City itself).

Definitely a short trip (only 86 miles) as a first leg, but allowed us to not be in a hurry to leave the house, and to go around the DC traffic on a Monday Morning. Photo from Candy Hill Campground in Winchester, Virginia.