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Hooligan Fireworks Safety Tips

On this 4th of July, it seemed fitting to pull this entry out of the Houseboat Hooligan archives. Hope everybody has a fun and safe 4th of July!

  • Fireworks should not be used while drunk
  • If you insist on using fireworks while drunk, do not hold them in your hand
  • If you insist on using fireworks while drunk and holding them in your hand, hold them right side up so that it shoots into the air
  • Fireworks should not be set off on top of a gas laden houseboat. Roman candles in particular should be held so they fire into the air, not into the houseboat
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Back to Edmonton

It’s been almost 3 years since my last trip back home, so I decided it was time to make another one. This year I decided to forego the annual Dragon*Con pilgrimmage and will be heading back to Edmonton September 6-13. Parents are getting older now, so I thought it would be better to see them sooner rather than later.

Hopefully the trip will be less of a pain in the ass than it was last time. I’ll be flying United again, but this time I’m skipping the <air-quote>CHS-ORD-YEG route</air-quote> (“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”) in favour of a hopefully less non-existent CHS-IAH-YEG route (YEG-EWR-CHS on the way back).

Naturally one of the things I’ll be looking forward to the most is eating dim sum. It will also be nice to get back home and visit with friends again.

I wonder what new things I’ll see when I get back there.

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Wedding special event station

As part of the wedding festivities, Connie and I decided it would be fun to get on the radio for a special event the morning of wedding day (July 19).

We don’t have a special event call sign and are just going to operate on the radio using our regular call signs (AB4UG and NR4CB).

We’re only going to be on the radio for a couple hours (band and frequency pending, but anywhere between 40m to 6m but not 30m) from 11AM-1PM EDT (1500-1700 UTC). We’ll be self-spotting ourselves on Twitter, so follow me (@imabug) or Connie (@NR4CB) to find us. We’ll also use the #CQMahWedding and #WATwitter hash tags. We’ll stay in the general portion of 40m-12m and in the tech portion of the 10m band so that everybody will be able to join in the fun. If you’re near the radio, tune in and work us!

We’ll also make some QSL cards using some of the wedding photos so if you’d like to get one, send us a card.

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Rain, rain, rain

It’s been unusually wet and rainy so far this year, a sharp contrast to the drought/near-drought conditions we’ve been having for the past few years.

Yesterday a particularly persistent and strong storm triggered several severe thundrestorm alerts and tornado warnings. Got some pretty torrential rains at the house that went on for around 3 hours, long enough to get some serious water running through the ditch beside the house and turn part of the back yard into a small river.

River through the yard

The tornado warnings were close enough that we spent part of the storm hunkered down in one of our little closets. The official rainfall amount was only a little over 1 cm yesterday, but there was definitely way more than that over James Island and Johns Island. I saw some reports saying there was close to 10 cm of rain in my area.

I hope the rest of the summer isn’t going to be quite this rainy.

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10 years of blogging

This little blog of mine reached a milestone a few days ago and I missed it. Over the weekend, the blog turned 10 years old!

10! That’s like old and decrepit in Internet Time I think.

The past year since the blog turned 9 has been pretty exciting, interesting and fun. Blog got moved and rebooted, and I fired up a second blog for the radio stuff.

I don’t see myself quitting the blog anytime soon and I’ve grown to enjoy the outlet blogging gives me. I think I probably need to post more often though. I’ll try to make myself do more of that.

10!

Go blog!