Saturday, January 20, 2007

No pleasing


This month's ham club newsletter has been an exercise is frustration. After being told the newsletter took a first class stamp, I bought the stamps with what money I had, added the stamps from my personal stash gathering dust in my stationery box and sent them out only to have them come back a few days later marked "insufficient postage." Lovely. The treasurer bought 24-cent stamps for all 62 newsletters and finally put them in the mail on Thursday. I got the first response to my message to the club about the newsletter snafu. The guy got his newsletter today and he had "no comments on all space used for C.W." CW stands for Morse code. There was a Federal Communication Commission (FCC) announcement that they have taken the Morse code element out of testing to get the more advanced lessons and it was a very hot issue for the amateur radio community. I wrote about it and one of the other members offered up his take on the issue and the demise of the American Way of Life and Liberty and the Pursuit of fundamental Christianity. I took out the religious diatribe since it has no place in a ham radio newsletter. He didn't complain. One guy who has no comments means he has a lot of comments and none of them are good. The rest of the comments I have heard in person is nothing but kudos for such interesting, timely and thoughtfully neutral coverage of a very sticky subject. How does it go? You can't please all of the people.

Men!

Or at least ham radio MEN!

The rest of my life is humming along smoothly. I have two new books I'm getting paid to review and I'm currently discussing the possibility of being a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Now that would be a major coup. One book is an atheist manifesto that is an international best seller originally written in French and the other a literary novel, a sophomore effort. I'm also almost done with my taxes. I've put in the information from my last paycheck of the year but I have to verify everything from the W-2 from work that I haven't received yet. The sooner I get it the sooner I can file and get this year's taxes over with and move on with the rest of the year.

At least the dreams have been exceptional the past couple of nights and everything looks good, really good, for a change. And it's snowing--or it was snowing a few minutes ago. Time to do laundry, put in some review book time and wrestle with more doctors.

That is all. Disperse.

No comments: