A Day in the Life

It’s 10 minutes past 9 in the morning.  I hope to go to my radio station (8 miles from home) and get on to work my friend Rus, K2UA, as he puts his first ever summit on the air.  But before I do that, I wanted to share a slice of my life if it will help anyone relate to me better.

We are all busy.  I get that.  I am not writing this to show you how much busier I am than you are.  But I do know that some will find it helpful to know exactly what chainsaws I juggle.

I woke up to emails from Tim, K3LR, about some mutual tower/antenna stuff we have going on at a personal level.  Completely different from anything PJ2T has going on with DX Engineering, where as you know, Tim is a major player.

This took me to Facebook where I found I was friended by Carol, K3LEA who is Barney, K3LA’s wife and with whom I had dinner with Tim and my wife Kathy a couple weeks ago.  In Ohio.  Small world.  Carol and Kathy will sing together at Dayton one of these years, it’s only a matter of time.

Facebook diverted (“squirreled”?) me to my other life as a patient advocate for people affected by congenital melanocytic nevi, where a colleague in Holland was hoping I could help a patient in Jakarta whose son is having seizures identical to the ones my daughter started having when I was operating the CQWW at PJ2T in 2005.  I asked to move that QSO to WhatsApp since I hate having that kind of conversation on Facebook.  Ugh.

Those seizures are caused by an insidious complication of the disease called neurocutaneous melanocytosis or NCM (but which got off on the wrong foot many years ago being incorrectly called neurocutaneous melanosis, and for which we continue to champion a namechange).  Did I mention I probably know more about this disease than just about anyone else in the world?  Imagine my joy when I learned about a week ago that this paper was finally published in Pediatric Radiology?  If you know me and my work in this area, you know it is the icing on the cake for 20 years of dogged determination by a dad who is not a doctor, but who would not take “no” for an answer, and has, at times single-handedly pushed the entire field forward.  All in a day’s work.

So the whole time I’m cramming this newsletter through (It was supposed to get published on August 1, after all, and you guys are really gracious to put up with me), I’m in a 3-way texting conversation with Holland and Indonesia, trying to help a distraught mom find solutions for her son’s epilepsy in a country where the doctors are … well … they have different standards than most of us are used to.

Yeah.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Not the first one this month, either.

But enough about me.  Another huge challenge sits before us all, that of getting our European Tower situation squared away at Signal Point, home of PJ2T, the club station of the Caribbean Contesting Consortium, proud purveyor of this very newsletter.  It turns out we have an imminently workable solution to get all the stuff from where it is, to where it has got to be (Geoff’s yard on Curacao), with the maximum probability of success.  Which has been very hard.  It looks like I can manage this transport by combining this effort with some tower/antenna moving I am doing with K3LR, in a couple weeks.  Before September 1, 100% of everything going to PJ2T will be gathered together in a single place, at the port in Miami, ready to make the big ocean-bound journey to its new home.

Now THAT is a feel-good moment! Thanks for your indulgence.