Here is a talley of today's spam, all of which ended up in junk mail, thankfully.

Prescription Drugs      4
Viagra, etc.              7
Male Enhancement     9
Won the lottery!!       2
Money to lend           3
Software sales          2
Porn                        1
Money laundering       10
    From Nigeria :

FROM THE DESK OF MR. WILLIE OBIANO
FIDELITY BANK NIGERIA PLC
2, KOFO ABAYOMI STREET ,
VICTORIA ISLAND LAGOS-NIGERIA

Degree/Diploma          2
Stock pump & dump    1


What's your spam breakdown? Be sure to leave comments so we can compare and contrast. This is important stuff...

Ballard is sort of a different little animal... a Seattle neighborhood on the west side, just north of downtown a mile or so. The phrase "ya, sure, you betcha" will probably be spoken at some point. Don't be alarmed. That's just how they roll down there.

We went for the standard tourist attraction there, the Hiram M. Chittenden locks. On the far side of the locks, beyond the dam,

there is a fish ladder with windows under water where we can view the salmon making their way back to lake Washington for spawning.

(Note fish in lower window.) We only had a half dozen fish visible today, but that isn't too bad considering it's just the beginning of July. The fish traffic really picks up in August and goes through September. There were a couple nice looking fish though... 28" for the largest, and it looked like about 20" for the smaller ones.

I'd eat em.

There is a very nice park there, with lots of grass for a nice picnic lunch, which we did not make use of on this visit. We watched a whole lot of boats lock through in the large lock. One of the boats was a very large yacht "Piano Bar" from the Cayman Islands
 
(at least registered there - someone apparently knows how to spell off-shore bank account...). Apparently it's owned by the founder of the Yellowstone Club (according to Googevil). Anyway, this massive thing rose almost 20 feet in the large lock from sea level to lake level. It is always pretty cool to see boats rising and falling in the locks.

In the park today there was a complete orchestra, giving us all a nice bit of music to listen to on a perfect summer day. The temperature was a perfect 70 degrees, with a light breeze. Sunny and warm, just right to be outside in the park. Should have brought my emergency backup frisbee with us from the car, but didn't think of it until later. What kind of a slacker ex-Califoreigner am I anyway. Totally, dude. But I digress.

Apparently the small lock is having some issues with its gate hinges, so it isn't being used much this summer. Too bad, because it sure is nicer to lock through being able to tie off to the floating cleats rather than having to man a line, reel it in, and keep it taught for the 20 minutes or so it takes to flood the large lock. It would be even harder if there are a couple more boats rafted on too... I've taken my boat(s) through the large and small locks both, and the small lock is definitely easier. The currents in the large lock are incredible too... looked literally like a river in there when the large lock was filled to lake level. I've seen a swarm of salmon swimming around in a large school in there too, in Augusts past.

It was nice to visit the locks again, perhaps one of these days I will get the boat ship-shape again and lock it through. Or I could just sit around and blog. Hmmm...

Well, it's independence day again. Flags are flying. It's raining. Cassanova owns my shoe.
And he says "Yeah, what's your point?" So everything is pretty much normal around here.

Did finally get around to putting up a swing on the corner of the partially started treehouse. You can't see it in the picture, but it's what the ladder is leaning up against. The floor joists are all that's built, and up 9' on the doug fir. So I figured I'd hang the swing off the corner. It sure did make all the wood rock up there when my son was testing the swing. I had intended to put up a diagonal support for each of the 4 corners but hadn't done it yet. It was required for this one, and it made the corner rock solid, even when swinging. He sure likes to swing on his new swing too, so that's a bonus. Someday I will actually get to building the rest of the dang treehouse.

The Segway 2's control unit runs on a CR-2430 lithium ion watch battery. Just thought I'd share that tidbit.

It's not a great design in my opinion to have a non-rechargeable battery. They could have designed in a loop coil with a diode and put in an alternating current magnetic field in the unit so that the field induces a current in the loop and it then could charge a small battery.

If my $50 electric toothbrush can do this why cant the $5000 Segway...

"CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day from kilowatt seven romeo ... K7R!"

That phrase is now permanently burned into my synapses. After operating or logging for almost the entire time from 11am Saturday to 11am Sunday, that phrase has been said literally thousands of times. I did take a nap between 2am and 5am Sunday, but basically that was just because the noise on the 80m band was so loud and my back was thrashed from sitting at a wooden picnic table for hours and hours. We operated continuously either calling CQ or scanning and pouncing on others calling CQ. It was interesting some times that we could hear two parties clearly who couldn't hear each other very well at all.

From what I heard, the propagation wasn't very good. Most of the contacts I made were along the west coast. Alaska, BC, Washington, Oregon, California. We did get some southwest and east coast stations too, but mostly on the west coast. The antenna was a sky-loop, suspended up about 60 feet, from half a dozen ropes to tall trees all around the perimeter of the lawn. It was a pretty amazing sight for a temporary antenna. Thanks to Icom for letting us borrow the 756 Pro III radios, those were pretty cool. I learned a little about the rig, but mostly just enough to operate for the contest. It sure would have been fun to make some foreign contacts for sure though. Here is a video from a guy in Seattle (K7HV) who made contact with one of our stations as his second contact.

As a team, we made lots of contacts in a lot of different modes. I personally operated the SSB station on 20m, 40m, and 80m for the day. We were operating 5A (5 simultaneous transmitters), completely independent of commercial power, on a total of three generators. I don't have the final numbers yet but I think the team logged over a thousand contacts. We used the N3FJP logging software which is user friendly but unfortunately relies on continuous network connectivity which is hard to keep running 24/7. I hooked my laptop up to the 27" wide screen LCD TV so the operator could get a clear picture of the software with the callsign and location and make sure both the operator and the logger got the data correct. That part wasn't a hardship...

The generators were fairly reliable until we realized that one was putting out only about 70V so we had to shut it down. The second one ran fine until 9PM when its solenoid failed, and the crew had to figure out how to repair the thing in the heat and growing darkness... They got the job done and got it back on line within an hour. Since we had the radios running direct from AC power from the generators, not only did we lose all wifi communications, we also lost contact time in the contest. Next time we will run all the radios off of car batteries, charged by an Astron charger running off the gen. We probably could have run the radio for 4 hours just off the battery I figure. My generator has a direct 12VDC output as well as the AC, so I could use that for a much more reliable and direct approach to emergency power.

The weather was hot as hell. And I've been there (SoCa), so I know. The thermometer under the awning at my operating station read 95 for almost the entire day Saturday. It didn't cool down to even 80 until after 9pm. There were few breezes and they only blew hot air around. It was really pretty brutal being out on the grass for that long in that heat.

We shut down Sunday at 11am, just as it was beginning to top 90 degrees again. Fortunately, we were all packed up and leaving the park by 1PM. We had a large crew, so cleanup was pretty fast. All in all there were some fun times, but the heat and bugs at night really took most of the fun out of it for me. For sure the next time I do emergency communications, I will be operating INSIDE my trailer instead of next to it.

This year for our annual Canada trip, we decided to venture not far from the border. The cost of fuel towing the trailer to the far reaches of the planet is now doubly prohibitive. While we complain about $4.30 gas here in Seattle, the Canadians are paying C$6.00 for theirs. A dollar and a half per liter in Vancouver was the norm.

We stayed in a "RV resort" campground in Hazelmere. I thought it was rather interesting that there were campers of all sorts, tent campers, RV campers, trailers, and class-A motorhomes. There were also lots of fifth-wheel trailers and small mobile homes that apparently are for permanent residents there. I have never seen permanent residents at a campground before, mixed in with the campers. Must be some kind of thing they are doing to exploit a loophole and avoid taxes I figure. There was a duck pond, a playground, and a small stream that runs through the park. It was a rather large place, probably about 50 acres I would guess. Lots of grassy areas too. The park was hosting a dog show for the weekend when we arrived. They had wifi, and we had a full hookup for the trailer, so it was rather civilized. However, my son and I were chased out of the hot tub rather rudely by one of the volunteer staff there. True we were breaking the rule on the spa because my son was under the age limit, but I didn't think the response was appropriate. So, other than a bit of attitude from the people, the place was fairly reasonable. It wasn't cheap though. $42 US a night for the full hookup spot (1.01C$ = 1.00US$ this trip). The weak dollar and the price of fuel certainly made this Canada trip the most expensive one we've ever taken - and that includes one where we drove all the way to Banff several years ago.

Vancouver is an interesting city. The building architecture and the city layout is different from any other city I have ever seen. High-rise apartment buildings are the norm in this downtown city. Whereas in downtown Seattle, about half of the high-rise buildings are residential and half are offices. The buildings are on average 30-50 floors I would guess. There are a lot of cars and traffic is heavy around rush hour. I can't imagine that there are more people that live in downtown Seattle than downtown Vancouver, but that's what it says online. It just seems to me that there are about 10x more apartments in Vancouver than in Seattle.

This year, we decided to visit Stanley Park - a very large park right on the edge of downtown Vancouver. We drove to the park and found a parking spot near the aquarium. There is a playground, and lots of other places to sit and relax in the park. The weather was good for us, just at 70F (21C) and bright blue skies. We hiked around the park for a while, and my son played on the playground equipment. We walked over to what we thought was the teahouse restaurant, looking for high tea. However, contrary to the brochures, the restaurant gone out of business and was taken over by a brew pub. Apparently it is seasonal, and we were there for its opening day. Food was OK, but prices seemed quite high. Don't think I'll need to go back to that one. We took the free shuttle bus around the park's outside loop road, trying to see all the sights from the different vantage points the park offers. It's a rickety old street car type bus, so it rattles pretty good. But it's free and fairly convenient.

I opted out, but the rest of the family decided to go to the Vancouver Aquarium there in the park, to see the sights below the bay. The beluga whales were the main attraction, and of course my son thought those were pretty cool. The pregnant beluga whale Qila had just given birth to a baby female whale a few days before our visit, so there were lots of people there to see the newborn calf. The aquarium has good web coverage with live whale cams, so they are fun to watch.

We drove out to Point Roberts, a small bastion of Washington state on a peninsula, south of Vancouver. The only way one can drive to this small Washington town is through Canada. It always sounded like fun, so this year we did it. We stopped for lunch to watch the orca whales playing in the sound. We didn't get a lot of great pictures, because they were about a quarter mile off shore, and we didn't have access to a boat. We did see a couple of them jump out of the water though, so that was fun. It was kind of interesting to see some of the Canadian homes that back up to the border. Some had hedges or fences that were just on the Canada side of the border, and others didn't have anything except a lawn that reached down to the small drainage ditch that was just on the US side of the border. It is interesting that there is no border fence, and only a marble obelisk every half mile or so to note the boundary.

All in all, it was a pretty good trip. The orca whales were a nice surprise bonus. Canada is definitely an interesting place, just a little bit different. It's nice to get out for our little change of pace every year, but it sure is nice to come home too.

My son begins his career as an impressionist photographer.