I went to my first post operative follow up appointment with the orthopedic surgeon on Monday. He wants me to rest for another six weeks before starting the physical therapy required to start building the strength back so I can walk. Rest consists of staying in bed for the majority of the day and I have an in home physical therapist who is working on my ability to get around on crutches, with a goal of being able to get upstairs to the shower in another week or two. I have to take sponge baths in the meantime by standing with almost all of my weight on my uninjured leg. The effort lays me down with a pain pill for the rest of the day.
Anyway the San Diego trip was scheduled for late October, within the six week window the surgeon gave me so we have had to cancel. We haven't had a vacation, other than at Christmas, sometimes for less than a week, since 2001 and I'm pretty bummed that I could not take my wife somewhere. If we do go to San Diego we will have to put it off until next spring.
I'm getting a lot of reading done and have managed to leave the TV off most of the time. I don't want to get through this thing and then be in the habit of watching a lot of TV. A friend gave me a 3 month subscription to Netflix, so I will be catching up with some movies I did not see when they were in the theater. I'm trying to keep my spirits up and not let this condition bug me.
A note on radio receptions. I heard the USGS using their Long Valley Caldera Net yesterday. They are on 169.825 and have a repeater on a hill east of Mammoth, that is called "Substation Hill" due to the nearby old sheriff substation. The official name of the hill is "Casa", but there is also an electronic site southeast of Crowley Lake named "Casa Diablo" (house of the Devil in Spanish) and using just "Casa" would be confusing. Anyway the USGS has a remote base/relay on Lincoln Mountain, which is a knob on the east side of Mammoth Mountain. The signal from the Casa repeater is relayed to Mount Hamilton near San Jose, then down to Menlo Park where the USGS has an office. They changed the repeater to P25 operation full time. My PRO-96 worked OK for the received audio, but the signal is the worst digital signal I have received yet. I have some old information showing the UHF link frequencies, but that has all changed since the narrow banding and change in UHF frequencies that has occurred recently. If something were active over here, someone in the Bay Area might be interested in listening to the Mt. Hamilton down link and Menlo Park up link. Of course I really don't want to have anything be active over here, at least till my wife can retire and we move down to the Owens Valley.
I will try to use my down time to submit information to the database for Mono and Inyo Counties. This has been on my to do list for a number of years and I just haven't gotten to it. What is listed there now, with the exception of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, is quite incomplete.
