The lady wife and I ran down to Bloomington last night so she could put on a training program at the Y today (it started at 8AM so we went last night to avoid her having to get up at 5AM today to drive down). Stayed in a very nice Fairfield Inn on West 3rd Street out by US 37. (When she set the date for this training, nobody seemed to know that it was Little Five weekend. As it turned out, we barely knew Little Five was even going on, because we got in last night and were back out north of Bloomington before the race was over.)
It is flippin’ wet down there. Many fields north of Bloomington just look like lakes. It’s not as bad as it was a few years ago when there was a lot more flooding and the roads down there were completely closed, but still.
When we came back, we cut over to 67 at Martinsville.* It was even worse over there; in some places I told Sally it reminded me of riding the train to New Orleans a couple of years ago and coming in around Lake Pontchartrain. Looked just like the bayou in other places, where the water was up into the trees and nearly up to the road itself; if there had been kudzu, I would have been convinced. We saw a couple of houses where you could fish off the back porch.
I spent most of the day studying for the Amateur Radio General exam so I can take it in June. I took the little Baofeng handheld with me but could not get any kind of a signal at all. I smelled a bit of a rat when I plugged in the earphone/mike that came with it, and the display went kind of crazy. When I got home and still couldn’t even hit the 700 repeater, I re-loaded my modded/saved configuration from CHIRP …after doing that the radio worked fine, so I have no idea what could have happened between Indy and Bloomington last night.
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* We cut over to 67 because there is bridge construction going on at IN-144 and US 37, which caused a 20 minute delay last night due to traffic cutting back from two lanes to one. Can someone PLEASE let me kill all the fuckers who stayed in the left lane AFTER the sign that said “LEFT LANE CLOSED ONE MILE” and ran all the way up to the merge point? Really, assholes, you aren’t going to get there any faster than we are.