Wednesday morning was a gift. I awoke to 60F with much lower humidity and hurried outside for a long walk while it was so nice. But not before opening all the windows to get some of this wonderful cool into the house after a solid month of being hermetically sealed away from the oppressive heat and humidity. By noon the temperature was rising rapidly so I closed the place back up and once again cranked up the air conditioning. I sure appreciated that lovely break…

As expected, LoTW came back up yesterday and seemed to buckle a little as the day wore on. You gotta figure there must have been a motherlode of Field Day contact confirmations hitting the server all at the same time. Looks like it’s still catching up with the incoming flood of server requests.

I did spend an hour in the shack and made a few contacts. One of them with KD6XU who was calling CQ POTA on 20. Copy was light, practically ESP levels. After kicking in the APF (CW audio peaking filter ) on the K4 and with a little tweaking I was able to make solid contact with Barry who was operating from the San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge (US-0209). Though our contact was brief, I followed up on his QRZ page where I saw he is a sailor, an ocean going fellow who sails the South Pacific for fun. I even watched a couple of his YouTube videos capturing his adventures at sea.

Once the sun went down the backyard was the place to be. The fireflies put on a proper show which was a little unusual because I don’t recall having seen so many of them in recent years. I also noticed the flowers and the lawn looked especially beautiful, the fireflies added magic to all this was the perfect end of what was an incredibly lovely day. Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention to these simple yet wonderful perks of life on this amazing planet?