Well, say goodbye to another month………………………………………………………

As always, first the chronology:

8/25/24 – Sunday – Up at 7:30AM. Kathy was up doing her hair and banging around. Had breakfast and got cleaned up for church. Out to church with Kathy. Home and lunch. Down to do the blog. Out to Gary’s for the afternoon get together. Home and picked up Kathy and over to Applebee’s for dinner. Home and usual evening routine.

8/26/24 – Monday – Up at 6AM and off to work. Court started at 8:30 and was done by noon. Home, dressed down and had lunch. Got an email about my social security number being on the dark web so I established an Experian account and put a fraud alert on my account. Kathy took off to run errands and go to a doctor’s appointment. I did some other computer work. Kathy came home, we had dinner then usual evening routine.

8/27/24 – Tuesday – Had the day off. Slept very well last night. Didn’t get up till 8AM. Spent the morning getting Kathy on Experian and getting all her stuff lined up. Then put some new antennas together and setup to start tuning them. Up for lunch. Out to the Morton building to finish sanding and get the shelf frames ready to start painting. Finished the first one and went in the house to finish tuning antennas. Fixed my VNA and did some computer work. Back out to the Morton building to start painting the second shelf frame. Inside and Kathy took a bath. I did some computer work. Talked to a friend of mine on my Hamshack Hotline. Another friend came over to survey the situation to put up my UHF Yagi antennas. Had dinner. Then took Kathy’s car down to the shop to have the oil changed tomorrow. Otherwise, usual evening routine.

8/28/24 – Wednesday – Up at 6AM and off to work. Court started at 9AM but we had to be there at 8:30. Actually got over there a little after 8AM. Had a 40 minute lunch break then court re-convened and finished up around 2PM. Stopped at the repair shop on the way home to pay for the oil change on the Vibe. Got home and put the truck away. Kathy was in bed so I quietly dressed down and crawled in and napped till about 4:30. Up and dinner. Down to retrieve the Vibe from the repair shop. Home and had dessert. Down to the shack and usual evening routine.

8/29/24 – Thursday – Up at 6AM and off to work. Worked the door at the Circuit Court Clerks office from 7:30AM till 4PM with a break for lunch between 12 noon and 1PM. Nothing exciting. Home, dressed down, played with the dogs and took a little rest. Up for dinner then some chores and usual evening routine.

8/30/24 – Friday – Up at 6AM and off to work. Court started at 8 and finished up around 12:30. Went to lunch with a couple co-workers then back to the court house for the swearing in of the new Sheriff and then everyone else in the department. Got home around 3:30PM. Took a nap. Had dinner then usual evening routine.

8/31/24 – Saturday – Up at 6AM. My friend Nick came over with a 35′ lift he brought home from work. He helped me put up some antennas and run some new coax. We finished up around 10:30 and Kathy made us a breakfast. Nick took off and I went to bed for awhile. Got up and did some things around the house. Back to the shack to work on TARPN some more. Had sandwiches for dinner as I wasn’t hungry. Usual evening routine.

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Now the specifics:

I got a very nice surprise this week. You know that everything associated with my website and BLOG is setup to notify me. Well, this week I got notified that Carter Rice, my grandson, subscribed to my BLOG. He is the first in what I would consider my immediate family to do that. So, thanks Carter and I hope I don’t bore you too badly.

Still haven’t heard anything from Lynn. I suspect she is overwhelmed with getting things wrapped up with her sister’s passing. I don’t feel like intruding but if I don’t hear something this week I’ll probably call her.

Kathy and I went to Applebee’s last Sunday for our usual Sunday evening dinner out. We have not been there for a long time as our last experience was much less than satisfactory. However, this week we were pleasantly surprised. We ordered two appetizers as we couldn’t decided between them. We got their pretzels with bar cheese and sweet mustard and of course their spinach artichoke dip. Both were very good. I got the shrimp and parmesan sirloin and Kathy got the grilled chicken salad. Mine came with garlic mashed potatoes and they were not very warm. Other than that, everything was delicious and of course we took a couple boxes of food home. I’m glad we decided to try it again.

I have a monitoring service through the bank that will notify me if any of my information is compromised. Long story short, I got notified this week and discovered several million social security numbers have been compromised.

Here is an excerpt from VOX news:

As many as 272 million Social Security numbers are floating around hacker forums after someone stole them from a Florida-based background check company called National Public Data, which is owned by an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy named Salvatore “Sal” Verini. This data breach is not as catastrophic as some headlines might make it seem. One news station ran a hyperbolic headline that claimed, “Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American.” They haven’t.

However, since I had not heard of this I established an Experian account which is totally free. They have free services like a search of your social along with other information retrieval tools. Of course they will hound you to up you subscription for a fee as well as other perks. But if you haven’t done so, I would strongly encourage everyone to establish an account and do the searches. If it appears your information has been breached then definitely register a fraud alert with Experian. That will not guarantee that you won’t have problems but it will decrease the chance.

Still fighting a losing battle with the medication. My PCP gave me a prescription for 20mg tablets and told me take them every other day and I still get a feeling like I have the flu on the days I take them. I have an appointment with him this week and I think I’m done with these things.

I have been getting bugged about getting my TARPN network up and running more efficiently so my friend Nick that works for a rental company brought home a 35 foot lift this weekend for me. He came over Saturday morning and he put up 3 UHF Yagi antennas for me and two new runs of coax. I should be getting the radios I need early next week and then I’ll rebuild the Raspberry Pi and hopefully be back on the air at 9600 baud in three directions.

Friday was a big day in town. The elected sheriff retired the end of the month as both he and his wife were having medical issues and there were some things they wanted to do while they still could. He also told me he was losing money by working rather than being on full retirement. So, for him it is a good thing. A great guy named Andrew Ware took his place. In Kentucky it there’s less than 1/2 the term left, the county judge executive can name a successor. I don’t think anyone argues the fact that Andrew is the best man for the job. He will make some mistakes as we all have in getting assigned a new position. There are just too many different management skills that you have to develope and it takes time to do that. I’m sure people will be critical of that but I think he will work his way through that without too much problem.

As a result of the new sheriff being sworn in, everyone in the department had to be re-sworn in. So that all got down Friday afternoon. And I was surprised that the young lady that is the Chief Justice for this part of Kentucky went out of her way to come to Taylorsville to do the swearing in. I was definitely impressed.

I ended up with a rather busy week. I worked a half day Monday, three quarters of a day Wednesday and Friday and of course all day Thursday. This coming week should be much better.

Well that about it for this week. Hope this finds you all safe and well. Stay that way and I’ll blog at you again next week.