💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › ups-and-downs.txt captured on 2022-07-16 at 15:56:55.
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Ups and downs ------------- For a good chunk of June I had the opportunity to travel through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus with my wife on a great summer holiday. We got to enjoy fantastic weather, extremely favourable pricing compared to Finland, and some very interesting parts of the world. I had plenty of chances to indulge my weird (and not at all politcally motivated) fascination with the material remains of the Soviet Union (especially military stuff). We got back home just before the mid-summer public holiday here, where a huge chunk of the population heads out to summer cottages in the woods to spend time relaxing, swimming in lakes, walking through forests and, of course, enjoying sauna. We don't have our own summer cottage, but thanks to some contacts at the university where I work, we were able to very cheaply stay in a small cottage on a small island in the local archipelago. The cottage is owned by the university and was built to accommodate researchers doing fieldwork on the island (mostly marine biology stuff, I think). It's very minimal - no running water, no electricity. It was amazing to spend 3 nights on, literally, our own private island, living an extremely simple lifestyle. I brought my shortwave radio along and had the best DXing time of my life, hearing many stations I had never heard before. Not just the usual national public broadcasters and religious groups, but utility stuff (like a time station I haven't identified yet, but which certainly wasn't the WWVH station in Hawaii that I often heard in NZ, and also the Deutscher Wetterdienst) and even the famous Chinese jamming station "Firedrake"[1]! My enthusiasm for the hobby is much renewed, and I have emailed requests for many QSL cards. So, I had been feeling pretty good lately, and looking forward to resuming the bicycle projects I put on hold whie travelling. My wife got a phonecall at about 5am this morning from her brother back in Australia. Their mother died of a heart attack the night before. We are flying back tomorrow to help with the funeral arrangements and to figure out what to do with her belongings. She rented, and lived alone, so everything needs to be sorted out fairly quickly. Dealing with such a huge undertaking at the same time as coming to terms with the loss (which I don't think has even begun to sink in for anybody yet) is going to be brutal, and a very marked contrast to the rest of June. I won't be without access to SDF or Circumlunar Space while we're away, but obviously I will be far less active on email/gopher/Mastodon than usual, even though I just got back from a long absence. I will try to keep my aNONradio show going, but we'll see what happens (tonight's show will certainly go ahead as planned, as it's already fully prepared). [1] https://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/Firedrake