[Elecraft] Kansas Snowstorm

[Matthew Zilmer]

Next time, demo your straight key or paddle for her.  

If she's too young to have a lot of language skills yet, now is the time to learn!  CW is, after all, a language.

73

Matt Zilmer
Consultant - Product Management Dept.
Magellan Navigation / MiTAC Digital Corp.
Tel: (909) 394-6052
Cell: (909) 730-6552
In status quo voluntas non sufficit


-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Jim Sheldon
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:28 AM
To: Elecraft Mailing List
Subject: [Elecraft] Kansas Snowstorm

Been a couple years without much winter snow (or summer rain for that matter).  The old adage "When it rains, it pours!" certainly fit this one.  It started about 8:00 yesterday morning and dumped around 5 inches in the first round, another inch in the second and then overnight it dumped another 6 inches of snow.  I think there was some rain in the second round as well so not absolutely sure the total.  The rainfall equivalent was just about 1.4 inches.

How does this relate to ham radio?  I have a heart pacemaker so not allowed to shovel all that snow and my wife went out last night to start on it.  Our neighbors came over and shoveled the walk for us.  Driveway cleared about 7 p.m. and after a nice bit of thanks and conversation, everyone went in.  Still not related to ham radio?  This morning we woke up about 4:30 to the sound of thunder!  Yes, thundersnow!  When we finally got up around 7:30, you couldn't tell the driveway had even been cleared last night.

Now, comes the good part - wifey went out again and started to clear the driveway again.  This time, another set of neighbors, two houses down that had just moved in a month or so ago were out doing their own driveway.  They made a deal with my wife that if she would watch their two year old daughter for a while, they'd shovel our drive too.  She agreed and I was on 40 CW when they brought the little girl over.  She was fascinated listening to the CW and spent the whole time here in the shack with me intently listening to the CW activity.  She didn't even want to watch cartoons on TV.  Her dad said that was the first time she ever settled down immediately at someone else's house and wasn't fussy at all.  Especially this early in the morning.  Might have started a new ham career, who knows?

Anyway, this might be the first case of a K3 babysitting a two year old and coming out unscathed - she never tried to grab the radio knobs, key or anything, just sat there and smiled the whole time.  My only regret is that I didn't have my wife take pictures of the whole episode.  Might have to get the neighbors to bring her over again and see what happens.

Jim - W0EB
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