Neanderpundit

Pray for the legal election of Scott Brown. Pray that God guide his hand and mind.

is the Western Area Amateur Repeater, and CARMA is one of the groups that monitor it. I listen on my way to work, sometimes, on 146.67. I just like to listen, but last week, someone made a comment I felt like responding to, so i picked the mike up and put my thumb on the key…..

And then took it back off. It dawned on me that maybe I wasn’t a legal operator anymore. So i put the mike down, and that night, I checked my license, pinned to a reedbuck hide above my desk. Sure as shit, I’d expired. So friday night I logged on to the FCC site, credit card in hand, to see if I could renew online.

Not only can you renew online, and not only is the process very nice and very easy, but when it asked for me to check my info for correctness and click “Continue” it just said “Your request has been processed” &etc.

No credit card.

I guess since this is the very first time I’ve ever had to renew my HAM license, I had no idea the renewal process was free. Damn. For once in my life i made contact with a government agency, got my request processed promptly, and didn’t feel like i was in the middle of a giant moist ass-rogering.

We have a rainbow vacuum cleaner. We have wood floors, so we tend to dust and mop, rather than vacuum, consequently it stays in the closet most of the time. I also use a shop vac to clean out the fireplace, which is the only good way to do it anyway.

The Rainbow is a decent vacuum cleaner, or so I’m told, but it has one significant bug/feature.

It doesn’t have a filter. it uses water to filter out the dust/etc in the air. This basically makes it a Dirtbong. The air gets sucked into the water and the water traps the dirt, and relatively clean air exits. This does a couple things: It doesn’t bog down when the water gets dirty, and the suction remains the same, and the water gets dirty with all the crap it cleans.

So you have a clean house, and a container full of the foulest shit you can possibly imagine. Now you have to dump this shit out. Figure out where to dump it out, and you don’t want to use your sink, or whatever, because the crap will clog your drain, you don’t want to flush it, for the same reason, so you have to sort of strain it and then deal with the strained crap.

So you strain it, and then you have a strainer full of pet hair, skin cells, house and street dust, dust mites, any parasites and crap that your pets may have brought into the house, and all other manner of filth. Now you have to figure out what to do with that.

This all came to my head because Partner’s nephew came and demo’ed a new Kirby vacuum cleaner- (Hell, everyone has to have a job, you know?) and i got to watch. He did a great job, and if I had the scratch to buy a wrestling jacket for a pissant I might well consider one of these machines- I have friends and family who have them, and they’re still made in the USA and apparently made very well.

Anyway. I have a Rainbow vac. And I’m gonna have it for a long time- without carpet, it’s unlikely to get used very much. And since I enjoy singing it’s theme song, I will continue to use it whenever a vacuum is indicated that will allow me to reclaim and examine every piece of filth in my home.

yes, theme song. Y’all didn’t know it, but I’m an accomplished parody song composer. Here’s the theme song for the Rainbow Vac, sung to the tune of ‘batman”

Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, Dirtbong!
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, Dirtbong!
Dirtbong, Dirtbong, Dirtbong!

I sing it while I’m vacuuming with my Rainbow Vac- or as I call it, my Dirtbong.