Turn the Page
Last night wasn’t the first time the kids around here had to do their trick-or-treating while it was snowing, but my memory is fuzzy enough that I can’t remember when that might have been. It was cold enough to snow all day yesterday but none of the white stuff was seen falling until about 4pm when flurries became evident. By 7:30pm it was really becoming an impressive event. Enough to cover the vehicles and make the ground look white while giving us something talk about and a memory for later. There were at least a couple dozen little ghouls at the door, not including our grandchildren, which I thought was a good turnout for 27F degrees and snow, but Brenda was disappointed. She was expecting a hundred or more based on the leftover candy. Oh well, maybe next year?
That chill in the air had me lighting the fireplace for the first time this season. Actually for the first time ever since we moved into this house in July. It’s a natural gas fireplace so nothing burned other than a few cobwebs, but it looked incredibly seasonal and released some heat into the family room. I think I’m going to like it.
You know HF band conditions aren’t good when you can’t hear FT8 signals on 20 meters around the clock. It was dead when I checked this morning so I moved down to 30 meters where I was able to copy exactly four stations and worked all of them. Then the well went dry. There was nothing else to work there. It should be interesting to see if the bands perk up as the sun starts to do its thing later today.
I submitted an updated application to the DXCC Awards desk yesterday that included having passed the 100 confirmation marks on 20 and 15 meters. My plan had been to wait until I had a thousand confirmations for the DXCC Challenge, but sitting at 558 I’m a terribly long way from that. I’m still holding out hope for a strong finish to the year, but time is getting short. It’s suddenly time to turn the page on the calendar again, it’s November.