Happy 44th Birthday to my sister Sheila

I want to wish my sister Sheila a very happy 44th birthday. I hope it is a great day for you and the start of a great year!

A Father's day cook out

Happy Fathers Day to all the dad's out there!

Today was a good fathers day for me. A couple of weeks ago I decided to buy a grill so that we could grill out from time to time. So this morning when my ten year old son got up he went out side for a while and when he came back in he announced that he had cleaned the grill. I guess that was his way of saying "I want to grill out this afternoon". So I made the trip to the grocery store and bought some hamburger meat and hot dogs.

Around 4:3opm today I started the fire in the charcoal grill. First off up until two weeks ago I had never grilled using a charcoal grill. The only grill I had ever used was electric. This being my third attempt at grilling on a charcoal grill I hoped I got it right this time. The food so far was just okay. After waiting about a 1/2 hour or a little more I finally put the food on to grill. As soon as I put on the hamburgers I knew it was going to turn out better this time. The food was good and I even melted some cheese on the hamburgers when they were done so we actually had bacon cheese burgers and hotdogs. My seven year old daughter doesn't seem to like food from the grill, but we had a good day and it was a GREAT fathers day.

Summer Time Projects

For the past several years I have had Summer Time projects that I wanted to accomplish, but for one reason or another I have failed to get some of them done.  This year I have lined out the list of projects I would like to accomplish before the winter winds and snow come back this year.  One of those projects was to install my new railroad scanner antenna.  About two months ago I bought a new commercial antenna for listening to railroad audio and I had not installed it as of yet, so today was the day.  I really didn't feel like getting this put up today, but it sure gives one a sense of accomplishment when a project is finished.   The amazing things is how much more I can hear with the new antenna.  Not only is it about 6 feet higher off the ground, but it also has about 5 db of gain (signal amplification).  As of a few minutes ago I was hearing not only the local trains, but trains calling signals about twenty miles away.  WOO HOO!